What exactly is meant by "partial function" in functional programming?
A partial function (both in the context of functional programming and mathematics) is exactly what the wiki says: a function not defined for all of its possible arguments. In the context of programming, we usually interpret "not defined" as one of several things, including undefined behaviour, exceptions or non-termination.
An example of a partial function would be integer division, which is not defined if the divisor is 0 (in Haskell it will throw an error).
in above snippet new_function is partial function.
That code would simply cause an error in Python, but if it worked as you intended, it would be a total (meaning not partial) function.
As commentors already pointed out, you're most likely thinking of the fact that it'd be a partially applied function.
You are here confusing two concepts. A partially applied function [haskell-wiki] with a partial function [haskell-wiki].
A partially applied function is:
Partial application in Haskell involves passing less than the full number of arguments to a function that takes multiple arguments.
whereas a partial function indeed is a non-total function:
A partial function is a function that is not defined for all possible arguments of the specified type.
The answers explain all, I will just add one example in each language:
def add(x,y):
return x+y
f = add(1)
print(f(3))
f = add(1)
TypeError: add() missing 1 required positional argument: 'y'
this is neither a partial function nor a curried function, this is only a function that you didn't gave all its arguments.
A curried function in python should be like this:
partialAdd= lambda x: lambda y: x + y
plusOne = partialAdd(1)
print(plusOne(3))
4
and in haskell:
plus :: Int -> Int -> Int
plus x y = x + y
plusOne = plus 1
plusOne 4
5
A partial function in python:
def first(ls):
return ls[0]
print(first([2,4,5]))
print(first([]))
output
2
print(first([]))
File "main.py", line 2, in first
return ls[0]
IndexError: list index out of range
And in Haskell, as your link showed up:
head [1,2,3]
3
head []
*** Exception: Prelude.head: empty list
So what is a total function?
Well, basically the opposite: this is a function that will work for any input of that type. Here is an example in python:
def addElem(xs, x):
xs.append(x)
return xs
and this works even for infinite lists, if you use a little trick:
def infiniList():
count = 0
ls = []
while True:
yield ls
count += 1
ls.append(count)
ls = infiniList()
for i in range(5):
rs = next(ls)
print(rs, addElem(rs,6))
[1, 2, 3, 4]
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5] [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
And the equivalent in Haskell:
addElem :: a -> [a] -> [a]
addElem x xs = x : xs
addElem 3 (take 10 [1..])
=> [3,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
Here the functions doesn't hang forever. The concept is the same: for every list the function will work.