Can one partially apply the second argument of a function that takes no keyword arguments?

Question

Take for example the python built in pow() function.

xs = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]

from functools import partial

list(map(partial(pow,2),xs))

>&g         


        

Answer 1

You can do this with lambda, which is more flexible than functools.partial():

pow_two = lambda base: pow(base, 2)
print(pow_two(3))  # 9

More generally:

def bind_skip_first(func, *args, **kwargs):
  return lambda first: func(first, *args, **kwargs)

pow_two = bind_skip_first(pow, 2)
print(pow_two(3))  # 9

One down-side of lambda is that some libraries are not able to serialize it.