specialisation
n 1: (biology) the structural adaptation of some body part for a
particular function; "cell differentiation in the
developing embryo" [syn: {specialization},
{specialisation}, {differentiation}]
2: the act of specializing; making something suitable for a
special purpose [syn: {specialization}, {specialisation}]
3: the special line of work you have adopted as your career;
"his specialization is gastroenterology" [syn:
{specialization}, {specialisation}, {specialty},
{speciality}, {specialism}]
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.