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Functional Python Programming

You're reading from   Functional Python Programming Discover the power of functional programming, generator functions, lazy evaluation, the built-in itertools library, and monads

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Product type Paperback
Published in Apr 2018
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781788627061
Length 408 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
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Toc

Table of Contents (18) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Understanding Functional Programming FREE CHAPTER 2. Introducing Essential Functional Concepts 3. Functions, Iterators, and Generators 4. Working with Collections 5. Higher-Order Functions 6. Recursions and Reductions 7. Additional Tuple Techniques 8. The Itertools Module 9. More Itertools Techniques 10. The Functools Module 11. Decorator Design Techniques 12. The Multiprocessing and Threading Modules 13. Conditional Expressions and the Operator Module 14. The PyMonad Library 15. A Functional Approach to Web Services 16. Optimizations and Improvements 17. Other Books You May Enjoy

Functions as first-class objects

It shouldn't come as a surprise that Python functions are first-class objects. In Python, function objects have a number of attributes. The reference manual lists a number of special member names that apply to functions. Since functions are objects with attributes, we can extract the docstring or the name of a function, using special attributes such as __doc__ or __name__. We can also extract the body of the function through the __code__ attribute. In compiled languages, this introspection is relatively complex because of the source information that needs to be retained. In Python, it's quite simple.

We can assign functions to variables, pass functions as arguments, and return functions as values. We can easily use these techniques to write higher-order functions.

Additionally, a callable object helps us to create functions. We can consider...

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