Question

I tried to reimplement something like partial (which later will have more behavior). Now in the following example lazycall1 seems to work just as fine as lazycall2, so I don’t understand why the documentation of partial suggests using the longer second version. Any suggestions? Can it get me in trouble?

def lazycall1(func, *args, **kwargs):
    def f():
        func(*args, **kwargs)
    return f

def lazycall2(func, *args, **kwargs):
    def f():
        func(*args, **kwargs)
    f.func=func   # why do I need that?
    f.args=args
    f.kwargs=kwargs
    return f

def A(x):
    print("A", x)

def B(x):
    print("B", x)

a1=lazycall1(A, 1)
b1=lazycall1(B, 2)
a1()
b1()

a2=lazycall2(A, 3)
b2=lazycall2(B, 4)
a2()
b2()

EDIT: Actually the answers given so far aren’t quite right. Even with double arguments it would work. Is there another reason?

def lazycall(func, *args):
    def f(*args2):
        return func(*(args+args2))
    return f

def sum_up(a, b):
    return a+b

plusone=lazycall(sum_up, 1)
plustwo=lazycall(sum_up, 2)
print(plusone(6)) #7
print(plustwo(9)) #11

Answer 1

The only extra thing the second form has, are some extra properties. This might be helpful if you start passing around the functions returned by lazycall2, so that the receiving function may make decisions based on these values.