Is there any way to tell if a function object was a lambda or a def?

Question

Consider the two functions below:

def f1():
    return \"potato\"

f2 = lambda: \"potato\"
f2.__name__ = f2.__qualname__ = \"f2\"

Short of

Answer 1

You could use ast.NodeVisitor to achieve your goal without hardcoding any calls to the functions by operating on the sources layer, with it you can identify ALL Lambda, FunctionDef, AsyncFunctionDef functions definitions and print out it's location, name, etc. Please see code sample below:

import ast


class FunctionsVisitor(ast.NodeVisitor):

    def visit_Lambda(self, node):
        print(type(node).__name__, ', line no:', node.lineno)

    def visit_FunctionDef(self, node):
        print(type(node).__name__, ':', node.name)

    def visit_AsyncFunctionDef(self, node):
        print(type(node).__name__, ':', node.name)

    def visit_Assign(self, node):
        if type(node.value) is ast.Lambda:
            print("Lambda assignment to: {}.".format([target.id for target in node.targets]))
        self.generic_visit(node)

    def visit_ClassDef(self, node):
        # Remove that method to analyse functions visitor and functions in other classes.
        pass

def f1():
    return "potato"

f2 = f3 = lambda: "potato"
f5 = lambda: "potato"

async def f6():
    return "potato"

# Actually you can define ast logic in separate file and process sources file in it.
with open(__file__) as sources:
    tree = ast.parse(sources.read())
    FunctionsVisitor().visit(tree)

The output for code below is following:

FunctionDef : f1
Lambda assignment to: ['f2', 'f3'].
Lambda , line no: 27
Lambda assignment to: ['f5'].
Lambda , line no: 28
AsyncFunctionDef : f6