Partial function application in Python

My previous post showed how it is possible to do partial function application in C++ by using function objects. Here I’ll show how much simpler this can be done in Python.

As before, we want to evaluate a function of one variable and three parameters: f(x; a, b, c) = 1000a + 100b + 10c + x. Here’s an example how we could do this in Python using the functools module.

from functools import partial

def f(a, b, c, x):
    return 1000*a + 100*b + 10*c + x

g = partial(f, 3, 1, 4)

print g(5)

The code will print 3145.

The function f above is so simple that it may be hard to imagine why you would want to do such a thing. The earlier post gives a more realistic application, using partial function application in numerical integration and root-finding.