specialization

n 1: the act of specializing; making something suitable for a

special purpose [syn: {specialisation}]

2: the special line of work you have adopted as your career;

"his specialization is gastroenterology" [syn: {specialisation},

{specialty}, {speciality}, {specialism}]

3: the structural adaptation of some body part for a particular

function [syn: {specialisation}, {differentiation}]

specialisation

A reduction in generality, usually for the sake of increased

efficiency. If a piece of code is specialised for certain

values of certain variables (usually function arguments), this

is known as "{partial evaluation}". In a language with

{overloading} (e.g. {Haskell}), an overloaded function might be

specialised to a non-overloaded instance at compile-time if

the types of its arguments are known.