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Comment by TheLoneWolfling | Hacker News Reader

I have a Python function that allows both of those:

    def randomString(alphabet, length):
        ....

    randomHex = partialApply(randomString, alphabet="0123456789ABCDEF")
    randomBase32 = partialApply(randomString, "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ234567")
    random10Char = partialApply(randomString, length=10)
    random4Char = partialApply(randomString, length=4)
    randomHexByte = partialApply(randomString, "0123456789ABCDEF", 2)

Comes in handy occasionally.

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And in case anyone else wants such a function, it's available in the standard library as functools.partial: https://docs.python.org/2/library/functools.html

Eh, I don't like the one in functools. It allows overriding of variables previously defined, which personally causes more problems than it solves.

(So `functools.partial(foo, b=3)(a=1, b=2)` doesn't throw an error, and is equivalent to calling `foo(a=1, b=2)`)

I think languages that have named parameters have very different sorts of techniques for these things. I don't know if they're more powerful or not, but they take a very different approach, and offer different design choices.

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