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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 ...
Python sets are very much like mathematical sets, and support operations like set intersection and union. Python also features a frozenset class for immutable sets, see Collection types. Dictionaries (class dict) are mutable mappings tying keys and corresponding values. Python has special syntax to create dictionaries ({key: value})
The examples are not intended to compare and contrast programming languages, but to serve as examples of higher-order function syntax. In the following examples, the higher-order function twice takes a function, and applies the function to some value twice. If twice has to be applied several times for the same f it preferably should return a ...
For example, in the expression (f(x)-1)/(f(x)+1), the function f cannot be called only once with its value used two times since the two calls may return different results. Moreover, in the few languages which define the order of evaluation of the division operator's operands, the value of x must be fetched again before the second call, since ...
In Common Lisp, the identifier of a function in the function namespace cannot be used as a reference to a first-class value. The special operator function must be used to retrieve the function as a value: (function foo) evaluates to a function object. #'foo exists as a shorthand notation.
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.
The standard type hierarchy of Python 3. In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is a collection or grouping of data values, usually specified by a set of possible values, a set of allowed operations on these values, and/or a representation of these values as machine types. [1]
In calculus, an example of a higher-order function is the differential operator /, which returns the derivative of a function . Higher-order functions are closely related to first-class functions in that higher-order functions and first-class functions both allow functions as arguments and results of other functions.