The arity of a function or operation is the number of arguments or operands that the function takes.
The arity of a function or operation is the number of arguments or operands that the function takes.
The term "arity" is rarely employed in everyday usage. For example, rather than saying "the arity of the addition operation is 2" or "addition is an operation of arity 2" one usually says "addition is a binary operation". In general, the naming of functions or operators with a given arity follows a convention similar to the one used for n-based numeral systems such as binary and hexadecimal. One combines a Latin prefix with the -ary ending; for example:
- A nullary function takes no arguments.
- A unary function takes one argument.
- A binary function takes two arguments.
- A ternary function takes three arguments.
- An n-ary function takes n arguments.
