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In computer science, a programming language is said to have first-class functions if it treats functions as first-class citizens.This means the language supports passing functions as arguments to other functions, returning them as the values from other functions, and assigning them to variables or storing them in data structures. [1]
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 ...
Lambda lifting is not the same as closure conversion. It requires all call sites to be adjusted (adding extra arguments to calls) and does not introduce a closure for the lifted lambda expression. In contrast, closure conversion does not require call sites to be adjusted but does introduce a closure for the lambda expression mapping free ...
In a given programming language design, a first-class citizen [a] is an entity which supports all the operations generally available to other entities. These operations typically include being passed as an argument , returned from a function , and assigned to a variable .
Calling f with a regular function argument first applies this function to the value 2, then returns 3. However, when f is passed to call/cc (as in the last line of the example), applying the parameter (the continuation) to 2 forces execution of the program to jump to the point where call/cc was called, and causes call/cc to return the value 2.
It is usually instantiated with, or borrowed from, models of computation such as lambda calculus which make heavy use of higher-order functions. A programming language can be considered higher-order if components, such as procedures or labels, can be used just like data. For example, these elements could be used in the same way as arguments or ...
This property is inherited from lambda calculus, where multi-argument functions are usually represented in curried form. Currying is related to, but not the same as partial application . [ 1 ] [ 2 ] In practice, the programming technique of closures can be used to perform partial application and a kind of currying, by hiding arguments in an ...
Anonymous recursion via explicitly passing functions as arguments is possible in any language that supports functions as arguments, though this is rarely used in practice, as it is longer and less clear than explicitly recursing by name.