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Functional Python Programming - Second Edition
book

Functional Python Programming - Second Edition

by Steven F. Lott
April 2018
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
408 pages
10h 42m
English
Packt Publishing
Content preview from Functional Python Programming - Second Edition

First-class functions

Functional programming is often succinct and expressive. One way to achieve it is by providing functions as arguments and return values for other functions. We'll look at numerous examples of manipulating functions.

For this to work, functions must be first-class objects in the runtime environment. In programming languages such as C, a function is not a runtime object. In Python, however, functions are objects that are created (usually) by the def statements and can be manipulated by other Python functions. We can also create a function as a callable object or by assigning lambda to a variable.

Here's how a function definition creates an object with attributes:

>>> def example(a, b, **kw): ... return a*b ... >>> type(example) ...
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Functional Python Programming - Third Edition

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781788627061Supplemental Content