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Python

Posted by csr13
csr13
33,293 Points

Python: Lambdas

Anybody knows of a good book, tutorial, post, course, etc.. that reasonably details how to properly use lambdas with python.

Thank you folks.

1 Answer

Alexander Davison
Alexander Davison
65,469 Points
Alexander Davison
Alexander Davison
65,469 Points

If you want to learn functional programming in Python—which includes lambdas—I recommend this course on Treehouse. Also, after searching the python.org website, I found this page specifically about lambdas. However, it doesn't really explain why or when to use them, so I suggest taking the course instead.

Lambdas, as tc11 said, are simply anonymous functions. They are convenient for whipping up a simple, short function to pass into another function. For example...

def apply_to_all(func, list):
    new_list = []
    for i in list:
        new_list.append(func(i))
    return new_list

# Waste of typing
def add1(x):
    return x+1
apply_to_all(add1, [1, 2, 3]) 

apply_to_all(lambda x: x+1, [1, 2, 3])  # More concise.