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In theoretical computer science, currying provides a way to study functions with multiple arguments in very simple theoretical models, such as the lambda calculus, in which functions only take a single argument. Consider a function (,) taking two arguments, and having the type (), which should be understood to mean that x must have the type , y ...
Multiple dispatch or multimethods is a feature of some programming languages in which a function or method can be dynamically dispatched based on the run-time (dynamic) type or, in the more general case, some other attribute of more than one of its arguments. [1]
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 ...
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.
Map is sometimes generalized to accept dyadic (2-argument) functions that can apply a user-supplied function to corresponding elements from two lists. Some languages use special names for this, such as map2 or zipWith. Languages using explicit variadic functions may have versions of map with variable arity to support variable-arity functions ...
Many dynamic languages, such as JavaScript, Lua, Python, Perl [1] [2] and PHP, allow a function object to be passed. CLI languages such as C# and VB.NET provide a type-safe encapsulating function reference known as delegate. Events and event handlers, as used in .NET languages, provide for callbacks.
The eval function takes two optional arguments, global and locals, which allow the programmer to set up a restricted environment for the evaluation of the expression. The exec statement (or the exec function in Python 3.x) executes statements: exec example (interactive shell): >>>
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.