6.7.4 Lambda Forms

By popular demand, a few features commonly found in functional programming languages and Lisp have been added to Python. With the lambda keyword, small anonymous functions can be created. Here's a function that returns the sum of its two arguments: ‘lambda a, b: a+b’. Lambda forms can be used wherever function objects are required. They are syntactically restricted to a single expression. Semantically, they are just syntactic sugar for a normal function definition. Like nested function definitions, lambda forms can reference variables from the containing scope:

    >>> def make_incrementor(n):
    ...     return lambda x: x + n
    ...
    >>> f = make_incrementor(42)
    >>> f(0)
    42
    >>> f(1)
    43