Functions

There are two ways of defining functions in Python.

• Traditonal def functions.
• Lambda functions

Traditional def functions

def function_name (param1, param2):
      <indented code>

• The def keyword defines the function with its parameters within parentheses and its code indented.
  
• The first line of a function can be a documentation string (“docstring”) that describes what the function does(Not mandatory but recommended). A docstring of any object can be retrived using object.__doc__
  
• Variables defined in the function are local to that function.
  
• Python functions by default return variable type None unless otherwise mentioned.

# Defines a "repeat" function that takes 2 arguments.
def repeat(s, exclaim):
    """
    Returns the string 's' repeated 3 times.
    If exclaim is true, add exclamation marks.
    """

    result = s + s + s # can also use "s * 3" which is faster (Why?)
    if exclaim:
        result = result + '!!!'
    return result

Lambda functions

Syntax: lambda arg1, arg2, …argN : expression using arguments.

- Python supports the creation of anonymous functions (i.e. functions that are not bound to a name) at runtime, using a construct called “lambda”.
- Lambda functions take any number of arguments but only has one expression, the result of this expression is returned.

>>> def f (x): return x**2
... 
>>> print f(8)
64
>>> 
>>> g = lambda x: x**2
>>> 
>>> print g(8)
64

• Lambda functions can be used anywhere a function is expected, not necessary to assign it to a variable.
  
• You can pass lambda functions to other functions to do stuff(for example lambda function as key to sorted())
  

mult3 = filter(lambda x: x % 3 == 0, [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9])