Daniel Voigt Godoy - Deep Learning with PyTorch Step-by-Step A Beginner’s Guide-leanpub

Higher-Order Functions
Although this is more of a coding topic, I believe it is necessary to have a good
grasp on how higher-order functions work to fully benefit from Python’s
capabilities and make the best out of our code.
I will illustrate higher-order functions with an example so that you can gain a
working knowledge of it, but I am not delving any deeper into the topic, as it
is outside the scope of this book.
Let’s say we’d like to build a series of functions, each performing an
exponentiation to a given power. The code would look like this:
def square(x):
return x ** 2
def cube(x):
return x ** 3
def fourth_power(x):
return x ** 4
# and so on and so forth...
Well, clearly there is a higher structure to this:
• every function takes a single argument x, which is the number we’d like
to exponentiate
• every function performs the same operation, an exponentiation, but
each function has a different exponent
One way of solving this is to make the exponent an explicit argument, just
like the code below:
def generic_exponentiation(x, exponent):
return x ** exponent
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