lambda

[Joey Gibson]

On Wed, 29 Mar 2000 10:19:04 GMT, morbid at doesnotlikespam.inet.net.nz
(Morbid Curiosity) wrote:

||| On 28 Mar 2000 22:37:53 -0800, Falknor <falknor at worldspy.net> wrote:
||| >Hmm, what exactly is the use of lambda?  It just isn't clickin for
||| >some reason....  Are they just syntactical candy (such as the ternary
||| >operator ?: in C++ is syntactical candy..) or what. *ponders*  Anyone
||| >who could explain it, and gimme a little example would have my thanx. :)
||| 
||| Lambda functions come from a functional programming paradigm, but I've
||| found a couple of situations where they're really handy in a general
||| imperative program, too. Have a look at this code snippet:

	It took me a while to 'get' lambdas at first too. They are most useful
(IMO) when paired with map(), filter() and reject(). These functions take a
function as the first argument. Using a lambda allows you to declare the
function inline as opposed to declaring the function earlier. 

	For example, this is applying a function to a list without lambdas:

aList = ['fred', 'ted', 'tom', 'bob', 'foo']

def myfunc(x):
	return x * 2

res = map(myfunc, aList)

	And here it is with lambdas:

aList = ['fred', 'ted', 'tom', 'bob', 'foo']

res = map(lambda x: x * 2, aList)

	I think you can also use them as defaults arguments to functions that
need a function as a parameter.

Joey

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