Can a lambda function call itself recursively in Python?

Question

A regular function can contain a call to itself in its definition, no problem. I can't figure out how to do it with a lambda function though for the simple reason that the lambda function has no name to refer back to. Is there a way to do it? How?

Answer 1

I have never used Python, but this is probably what you are looking for.

Answer 2

The only way I can think of to do this amounts to giving the function a name:

fact = lambda x: 1 if x == 0 else x * fact(x-1)

or alternately, for earlier versions of python:

fact = lambda x: x == 0 and 1 or x * fact(x-1)

Update: using the ideas from the other answers, I was able to wedge the factorial function into a single unnamed lambda:

>>> map(lambda n: (lambda f, *a: f(f, *a))(lambda rec, n: 1 if n == 0 else n*rec(rec, n-1), n), range(10))
[1, 1, 2, 6, 24, 120, 720, 5040, 40320, 362880]

So it's possible, but not really recommended!

Answer 3

You can't directly do it, because it has no name. But with a helper function like the Y-combinator Lemmy pointed to, you can create recursion by passing the function as a parameter to itself (as strange as that sounds):

# helper function
def recursive(f, *p, **kw):
   return f(f, *p, **kw)

def fib(n):
   # The rec parameter will be the lambda function itself
   return recursive((lambda rec, n: rec(rec, n-1) + rec(rec, n-2) if n>1 else 1), n)

# using map since we already started to do black functional programming magic
print map(fib, range(10))

This prints the first ten Fibonacci numbers: [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55],

Answer 4

If you were truly masochistic, you might be able to do it using C extensions, but to echo Greg (hi Greg!), this exceeds the capability of a lambda (unnamed, anonymous) functon.

No. (for most values of no).

Answer 5

Yes. I have two ways to do it, and one was already covered. This is my preferred way.

(lambda v: (lambda n: n * __import__('types').FunctionType(
        __import__('inspect').stack()[0][0].f_code, 
        dict(__import__=__import__, dict=dict)
    )(n - 1) if n > 1 else 1)(v))(5)