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Discover and modify source-code constructions (such as code blocks, classes, methods, protocols, etc.) as first-class objects at runtime. Convert a string matching the symbolic name of a class or function into a reference to or invocation of that class or function. Evaluate a string as if it were a source-code statement at runtime.
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 ...
The second option, on the other hand, does not share these restrictions, but it may be less intuitive as it requires a reference to a separate class instead of using the methods of the class in question directly. As an example, consider a need of extending the string class with a new reverse method whose return value is a string with the ...
According to this principle, member variables of a class are made private to hide and protect them from other code, and can only be modified by a public member function (the mutator method), which takes the desired new value as a parameter, optionally validates it, and modifies the private member variable.
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:
C# makes use of reification to provide "first-class" generic objects that can be used like any other class, with code generation performed at class-load time. [29] Furthermore, C# has added several major features to accommodate functional-style programming, culminating in the LINQ extensions released with C# 3.0 and its supporting framework of ...
The term closure is often used as a synonym for anonymous function, though strictly, an anonymous function is a function literal without a name, while a closure is an instance of a function, a value, whose non-local variables have been bound either to values or to storage locations (depending on the language; see the lexical environment section below).
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]