Specialisation

2 definitions found

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  specialisation
       n 1: (biology) the structural adaptation of some body part for a
            particular function; "cell differentiation in the
            developing embryo" [syn: {specialization}, {differentiation}]
       2: the act of specializing; making something suitable for a
          special purpose [syn: {specialization}]


       3: the special line of work you have adopted as your career;
          "his specialization is gastroenterology" [syn: {specialization},
           {specialty}, {speciality}, {specialism}]

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:

  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.