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The usual alternative is to use named functions and named recursion. Given an anonymous function, this can be done either by binding a name to the function, as in named function expressions in JavaScript, or by assigning the function to a variable and then calling the variable, as in function statements in JavaScript.
A higher-order function is a function that takes a function as an argument or returns one as a result. This is commonly used to customize the behavior of a generically defined function, often a looping construct or recursion scheme. Anonymous functions are a convenient way to specify such function arguments. The following examples are in Python 3.
The term closure is often used as a synonym for anonymous function, though strictly, an anonymous function is a function literal without a name, while a closure is an instance of a function, a value, whose non-local variables have been bound either to values or to storage locations (depending on the language; see the lexical environment section below).
The data from these papers is summarized in the following table, where the dispatch ratio DR is the average number of methods per generic function; the choice ratio CR is the mean of the square of the number of methods (to better measure the frequency of functions with a large number of methods); [2] [3] and the degree of specialization DoS is ...
Intuitively, partial function application says "if you fix the first argument of the function, you get a function of the remaining arguments". For example, if function div stands for the division operation x/y, then div with the parameter x fixed at 1 (i.e., div 1) is another function: the same as the function inv that returns the ...
A simple example of a higher-ordered function is the map function, which takes, as its arguments, a function and a list, and returns the list formed by applying the function to each member of the list. For a language to support map, it must support passing a function as an argument.
In Python, functions are first-class objects, just like strings, numbers, lists etc. This feature eliminates the need to write a function object in many cases. Any object with a __call__() method can be called using function-call syntax. An example is this accumulator class (based on Paul Graham's study on programming language syntax and ...
In this Erlang example, the higher-order function or_else/2 takes a list of functions (Fs) and argument (X). It evaluates the function F with the argument X as argument. If the function F returns false then the next function in Fs will be evaluated. If the function F returns {false, Y} then the next function in Fs with argument Y will be ...