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In computer science, a programming language is said to have first-class functions if it treats functions as first-class citizens.This means the language supports passing functions as arguments to other functions, returning them as the values from other functions, and assigning them to variables or storing them in data structures. [1]
A function call using named parameters differs from a regular function call in that the arguments are passed by associating each one with a parameter name, instead of providing an ordered list of arguments. For example, consider this Java or C# method call that doesn't use named parameters:
A function object solves those problems since the function is really a façade for a full object, carrying its own state. Many modern (and some older) languages, e.g. C++, Eiffel, Groovy, Lisp, Smalltalk, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala, and many others, support first-class function objects and may even make significant use of them. [3]
In Python, functions are first-class objects that can be created and passed around dynamically. Python's limited support for anonymous functions is the lambda construct. An example is the anonymous function which squares its input, called with the argument of 5:
In these languages, every function has exactly one parameter, and what may look like the definition of a function of multiple parameters, is actually syntactic sugar for the definition of a function that returns a function, etc. Function application is left-associative in these languages as well as in lambda calculus, so what looks like an ...
A function definition starts with the name of the type of value that it returns or void to indicate that it does not return a value. This is followed by the function name, formal arguments in parentheses, and body lines in braces. In C++, a function declared in a class (as non-static) is called a member function or method.
A local class is a class defined within a procedure or function. Such structure limits references to the class name to within the scope where the class is declared. Depending on the semantic rules of the language, there may be additional restrictions on local classes compared to non-local ones.
In a programming language, an evaluation strategy is a set of rules for evaluating expressions. [1] The term is often used to refer to the more specific notion of a parameter-passing strategy [2] that defines the kind of value that is passed to the function for each parameter (the binding strategy) [3] and whether to evaluate the parameters of a function call, and if so in what order (the ...