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The names "lambda abstraction", "lambda function", and "lambda expression" refer to the notation of function abstraction in lambda calculus, where the usual function f (x) = M would be written (λx. M), and where M is an expression that uses x. Compare to the Python syntax of lambda x: M.
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:
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).
The examples 1 and 2 denote different terms, differing only in where the parentheses are placed. They have different meanings: example 1 is a function definition, while example 2 is a function application. The lambda variable x is a placeholder in both examples. Here, example 1 defines a function .
To apply such a function object, one must use the funcall function: (funcall #'foo bar baz). Python Explicit partial application with functools.partial since version 2.5, and operator.methodcaller since version 2.6. Ruby The identifier of a regular "function" in Ruby (which is really a method) cannot be used as a value or passed.
Python's name is derived from the British comedy group Monty Python, whom Python creator Guido van Rossum enjoyed while developing the language. Monty Python references appear frequently in Python code and culture; [189] for example, the metasyntactic variables often used in Python literature are spam and eggs instead of the traditional foo and ...
An example of such a function is the function that returns 0 for all even integers, and 1 for all odd integers. In lambda calculus , from a computational point of view, applying a fixed-point combinator to an identity function or an idempotent function typically results in non-terminating computation.
Dirichlet lambda function, λ(s) = (1 – 2 −s)ζ(s) where ζ is the Riemann zeta function; Liouville function, λ(n) = (–1) Ω(n) Von Mangoldt function, Λ(n) = log p if n is a positive power of the prime p; Modular lambda function, λ(τ), a highly symmetric holomorphic function on the complex upper half-plane