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Functional Python Programming

You're reading from   Functional Python Programming Create succinct and expressive implementations with functional programming in Python

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jan 2015
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781784396992
Length 360 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1):
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Steven F. Lott Steven F. Lott
Author Profile Icon Steven F. Lott
Steven F. Lott
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Table of Contents (18) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Introducing Functional Programming 2. Introducing Some Functional Features FREE CHAPTER 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 Index

Functors and applicative functors


The idea of a functor is a functional representation of a piece of simple data. A functor version of the number 3.14 is a function of zero arguments that returns this value. Consider the following example:

pi= lambda : 3.14

We created a zero-argument lambda object that has a simple value.

When we apply a curried function to a functor, we're creating a new curried functor. This generalizes the idea of "apply a function to an argument to get value" by using functions to represent the arguments, the values, and the functions themselves.

Once everything in our program is a function, then all processing is simply a variation on the theme of functional composition. The arguments and results of curried functions can be functors. At some point, we'll apply a getValue() method to a functor object to get a Python-friendly, simple type that we can use in uncurried code.

Since all we've done is functional composition, no calculation needs to be done until we actually demand...

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