What are first class objects in Python

Question

What entities are called first-class objects in Python? Also, I want to know why are they called first class.

Answer 1

First-class objects in a language are handled uniformly throughout. They may be stored in data structures, passed as arguments, or used in control structures. A programming language is said to support first-class functions if it treats functions as first-class objects. Python supports the concept of First Class functions.

Properties of first-class functions:

• A function is an instance of the Object type.
• You can store the function in a variable.
• You can pass the function as a parameter to another function.
• You can return the function from a function.
• You can store them in data structures such as hash tables, lists, …

Python functions are first-class objects. In the example below, we are assigning a function to a variable. This assignment doesn’t call the function. It takes the function object referenced by shout and creates a second name pointing to it, yell.

# Python program to illustrate functions can be treated as objects def shout(text): return text.upper() print shout('Hello') yell = shout print yell('Hello')

Output

HELLO
HELLO