anonymous functions? class?

[Erik Max Francis]

Peter Bismuti wrote:

> 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)
	...
> Something like that. Here the function has not been named and was not
> defined outside of the call.   Can this be done in Python?

Yes.  Python has lambda functions for this, although there are some
restrictions:   lambda functions have to take at least one argument
(otherwise what's the point), and they can only evaluate to expressions,
rather than whole statements.

>>> map(lambda x: 2*x, range(10))
[0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18]

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