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Lua Academy · Lesson

Partial Application

Pre-fill function arguments.

What Is Partial Application?

Partial application means fixing some of a function's arguments now and supplying the rest later. You get back a new function that needs fewer arguments.

This lets you turn a general function into a specialized one by locking in the values you already know.

A Manual Example

Suppose you have an add function. You can build addFive by writing a closure that captures 5 and waits for the second number.

The captured value lives in the returned function, so each call only needs the remaining argument.

local function add(a, b)
  return a + b
end

local function addFive(b)
  return add(5, b)
end

print(addFive(10))
print(addFive(2))

All lessons in this course

  1. Functions as Values
  2. map, filter, reduce
  3. Partial Application
  4. Composing Functions
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