What exactly is meant by “partial function” in functional programming?

manpreet Best Answer 3 years ago

_x000D_ A partial function is a function that is not defined for all possible arguments of the specified type. What is very unclear to me in this definition is the part: is a function that is not defined A better description of a partial function (IMO) will be: A partial function is a function calling another existing function with one or more paramaters - of that existing function - predefined. And then the example to go with it: from functools import partial def multiply(x,y): #<< existing function return x * y dbl = partial(multiply,2) . #<< new function with `predefined` parameter(s) print(dbl(4)) A good place to learn more about this partial functions: https://www.learnpython.org/en/Partial_functions