After mastering functions, Alex became curious about lambda functions in Python. They had heard that lambda functions were a more concise and elegant way of defining functions, and they wanted to learn more about them.
To better understand lambda functions, Alex decided to create a simple program that would use a lambda function to calculate the area of a rectangle. They began by writing a simple formula to calculate the area:
# Formula for calculating the area of a rectangle
# Author: Alex
# Date: 2/25/2023
width = 5
height = 10
area = width * height
print("The area of the rectangle is:", area)
In this code, Alex manually calculated the area of a rectangle using a fixed width and height. However, they realized that this code would not be very useful if they wanted to calculate the area of a rectangle with different dimensions.
To solve this problem, Alex decided to use a lambda function to define a function that would calculate the area of a rectangle given its width and height as input parameters. They began by defining the lambda function:
# Lambda function for calculating the area of a rectangle # Author: Alex # Date: 2/25/2023 calculate_area = lambda width, height: width * height
In this code, Alex defined a lambda function called calculate_area that takes two input parameters, width and height, and calculates the area of a rectangle using the formula width * height.
Alex was excited to see their new lambda function in action. They called the function with different input parameters to calculate the area of rectangles with different dimensions:
# Program to calculate the area of rectangles using a lambda function
# Author: Alex
# Date: 2/25/2023
# Defining the lambda function for calculating the area of a rectangle
calculate_area = lambda width, height: width * height
# Calculating the area of a rectangle with width 5 and height 10
area1 = calculate_area(5, 10)
print("The area of the rectangle is:", area1)
# Calculating the area of a rectangle with width 3 and height 7
area2 = calculate_area(3, 7)
print("The area of the rectangle is:", area2)
In this code, Alex defined the lambda function calculate_area and then called it twice with different input parameters. The program printed the area of each rectangle using the values returned by the function.
Alex was impressed by how concise and elegant lambda functions were in Python. They realized that lambda functions were a powerful tool for defining simple functions quickly and easily, and that they could be used to simplify many programming problems.
