anonymous functions? class?

[Justin Dubs]

"Peter Bismuti" <peterb at cortland.com> wrote in message
news:3bf4240d$1 at 207.229.64.20...
> I want to pass a function as an argument but don't want to have to define
it
> globally.
> I think the proper terminology for this is "anonymous".
>
> The way I *don't* want to do it:
>
> def foo():
>     pass
> callFunction(foo)
>
> The way I want to do it:
>
> callFunction(def foo(): pass)
>
>
> I'm guessing this can't be done because of Python's indenting syntax.
> In ECMAscript you can send a function as an argument that is defined on
the
> fly such as:
>
> callMyFunction( new Function(){ blah blah })
>
> Something like that. Here the function has not been named and was not
> defined outside of the call.   Can this be done in Python?
>
> Thanks
>
>

If it's a short function than you can use lambda syntax as follows:

mul = lambda x, y : x * y

This defines a function called mul that takes two arguments, x and y, and
returns their product.  The generic form is:

lambda args : value

So, you can do this:

functionToCall( lambda x : x + 1 )

Hope that helps.  Have fun,

Justin