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Dictionary

Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

contravariance en · NOUN

Pronunciation

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *ḱe? Proto-Indo-European *ḱóm Proto-Italic *kom Proto-Italic *kom- Proto-Indo-European *-teros Proto-Italic *-teros Proto-Italic *komterosder. Proto-Italic *komterād Latin contrābor. English contra- English variance English contravariance From contra- + variance.

Meanings

  1. (countable, qualifier:object-oriented programming, uncountable) The reversal of the order of data types acted upon by an operator.
    • I get why with covariance I can return a Dog (a Dog is a Mammal), but why does contravariance work the other way? Shouldn't it accept a derived type when it expects a base type? Contravariance is consistent with Postel's Law: […] 2005, Jesse Liberty, Visual C# 2005: A Developer's Notebook, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 47:
  2. (countable, uncountable) A functor which reverses composition.
  3. (countable, uncountable) Of vectors, the property of scaling inversely with a change of basis, as opposed to covariance.

Forms

SpellingFeaturesLabelsSource
contravariances Number=Plur lexicographic

Coordinates

covariance

Relateds

contravariant

Translations (10)

ro contravarianță (reversal of the order of data types acted upon by an operator) · kk контраварианттық (reversal of the order of data types acted upon by an operator) · cmn 逆變 /逆变 (reversal of the order of data types acted upon by an operator) · de Kontravarianz (reversal of the order of data types acted upon by an operator) · fr contravariance (reversal of the order of data types acted upon by an operator) · pt contravariância (reversal of the order of data types acted upon by an operator) · de Kofunktor (functor which reverses composition) · fi kontravarianssi (functor which reverses composition) · ru контравариантность (reversal of the order of data types acted upon by an operator) · fi kontravarianssi (reversal of the order of data types acted upon by an operator)