February 2009
Intermediate to advanced
68 pages
1h 51m
English
Content preview from Advanced Python 3 Programming Techniques
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Chapter 16. Functional-Style Programming
Functional-style programming is an approach to programming where computations are built up from combining functions that don’t modify their arguments and that don’t refer to or change the program’s state, and that provide their results as return values. One strong appeal of this kind of programming is that (in theory), it is much easier to develop functions in isolation and to debug functional programs. This is helped by the fact that functional programs don’t have state changes, so it is possible to reason about their functions mathematically.
Three concepts that are strongly associated with functional programming are mapping, filtering, and reducing. Mapping involves taking a function and an ...