A lot of programming languages these days feature lambda functions, or what I would be just as happy to call anonymous functions. Some people make a big deal out of these but the core idea is very simple. Sometimes you need a little snippet of code that you only need in one place — most commonly, as a callback function to pass another function — so why bother giving it a name? Depending on the language, there can be more to it that, especially if you get into closures and currying.
For example, in Python, the map function takes a function as an argument. Suppose you have a list and you want to capitalize each word in the list. A Python string has a capitalize method and you could write a loop to apply it to each element in the list. However, map and a lambda can do it more concisely:
map(lambda x: x.capitalize(), ['madam','im','adam'])
The anonymous function here takes an argument x and calls the capitalize method on it. The map call ensures that the anonymous function is called once for each item.
Modern C++ has lambda expressions. However, in C you have to define a function by name and pass a pointer — not a huge problem, but it can get messy if you have a lot of callback functions that you use only one time. It’s just hard to think up that many disposable function names. However, if you use gcc, there are some nonstandard C features you can use to get most of what you want out of lambda expressions.
