[Python-Dev] functools.compose to chain functions together

Peter Harris scav at blueyonder.co.uk
Fri Aug 28 21:27:27 CEST 2009


I am personally indifferent to this, even though I had in mind in 
PEP309, that compose would probably end up in there too.

On the one hand, some people will keep on expecting it to be there. The 
ones that care about it will not be confused: they'll expect 
compose(f,g)(x) to be f(g(x)) as is proposed.  It can't do any 
significant harm.

On the other hand it's not likely to be used even as often as partial, 
which I always wanted mostly to make anonymous callables for Tkinter, 
not because of any ivory-tower functional programming bias.  And the 
most common use case of compose() is covered by a one-liner that really 
doesn't need to be in the standard library.

I'll say +0, with the + because if new Python programmers run across 
compose() in the docs, and aren't familiar with the idea, they can 
follow a link from there to Wikipedia, and maybe it will give them an 
idea we haven't thought of for something cool to do with it.

Peter Harris



More information about the Python-Dev mailing list