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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.
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:
In Python, a generator can be thought of as an iterator that contains a frozen stack frame. Whenever next() is called on the iterator, Python resumes the frozen frame, which executes normally until the next yield statement is reached. The generator's frame is then frozen again, and the yielded value is returned to the caller.
For example, to perform an element by element sum of two arrays, a and b to produce a third c, it is only necessary to write c = a + b In addition to support for vectorized arithmetic and relational operations, these languages also vectorize common mathematical functions such as sine. For example, if x is an array, then y = sin (x)
Folds can be regarded as consistently replacing the structural components of a data structure with functions and values. Lists, for example, are built up in many functional languages from two primitives: any list is either an empty list, commonly called nil ([]), or is constructed by prefixing an element in front of another list, creating what is called a cons node ( Cons(X1,Cons(X2,Cons ...
In computer science, message passing is a technique for invoking behavior (i.e., running a program) on a computer.The invoking program sends a message to a process (which may be an actor or object) and relies on that process and its supporting infrastructure to then select and run some appropriate code.
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 languages which support first-class functions and currying, map may be partially applied to lift a function that works on only one value to an element-wise equivalent that works on an entire container; for example, map square is a Haskell function which squares each element of a list.