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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:
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 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.
In C and C++, return exp; (where exp is an expression) is a statement that tells a function to return execution of the program to the calling function, and report the value of exp. If a function has the return type void, the return statement can be used without a value, in which case the program just breaks out of the current function and ...
In a statement such as while ((ch = getchar ())!= EOF) {…}, the return value of a function is used to control a loop while assigning that same value to a variable. In other programming languages, Scheme for example, the return value of an assignment is undefined and such idioms are invalid.
A lookup table, which contains, as keys, the case values and, as values, the part under the case statement. (In some languages, only actual data types are allowed as values in the lookup table. In other languages, it is also possible to assign functions as lookup table values, gaining the same flexibility as a real switch statement.
The loop body is executed "for" the given values of the loop variable. This is more explicit in ALGOL versions of the for statement where a list of possible values and increments can be specified. In Fortran and PL/I, the keyword DO is used for the same thing and it is named a do-loop; this is different from a do while loop.