Introduction to Functions for Python Programming Language 20-04-2022

Modern computer programming languages like the Python programming language hereafter called Python come with extensive built-in support for code reusability in the form of functions. For example, Python out of the box comes with 70 built-in functions which are always available to help you perform some common tasks easily. Furthermore, Python built-in data structures like lists, tuples, sets, dictionaries, strings come with specialised functions called methods that are used to perform specific tasks on their respective data structures. Python also allows its users to create their own functions called User Defined Functions abbreviated UDFs and Lambda functions ( i.e. small short one line functions ). Once created, these UDFs can be stored in simple text files with the extension .py called Modules for future use.

In this fourth lecture of a 10-part seminar lecture series titled “Python programming for Scientists” , I will present an introduction to code reusability in Python with functions. I will show how to call and pass information to built-in functions. I will also show how to create UDFs and Lambda functions, pass information to UDFs and Lambda functions by using positional arguments and keyword arguments. I will also show how to save values returned by UDFs and Lambda functions in variables.