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Functional Python Programming, 3rd edition
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We need to distinguish between two broad species of functions, as follows:
Scalar functions: These apply to individual values and compute an individual result. Functions such as abs()
, pow()
, and the entire math
module are examples of scalar functions.
Collection functions: These work with iterable collections.
We can further subdivide these collection functions into three subspecies:
Reduction: This uses a function to fold values in the collection together, resulting in a single final value. For example, if we fold + operations into a sequence of integers, this will compute the sum. This can be also be called an aggregate function, as it produces a single aggregate value for an input collection. Functions like sum()
and len()
are examples of reducing a collection to a single value.
Mapping: This applies a scalar function to each individual item of a collection; the result is a collection of the same size. The built-in map()
function does this...