Lecture 10 — Higher-order functions and decorators

Thu 29 Oct 2026 · Boris Bolliet

TL;DR — A decorator is a function applied to a function at definition time. The wrapper it returns is a closure over the original.

Slides Notes Self-test

Demonstration files

File	View	Download	Colab
lecture10-mine.ipynb
lecture10.ipynb

No new data in this lecture. The runs of experiments/cost.py and experiments/timing.py are synthetic (the chemostat-scale Lotka–Volterra model of models.CHEMOSTAT). experiments/fib_cache.py reads data/C9.csv, one of the ten chemostat runs of Blasius, Rudolf, Weithoff, Gaedke and Fussmann, Long-term cyclic persistence in an experimental predator-prey system, Nature 577, 226–230 (2020), data set on figshare doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.10045976 (CC BY 4.0), as cited in the lecture-4 demo.

Content

1. Functions that take and return functions
   • Higher-order functions
   • Wrappers
   • Forwarding of arguments
   • Metadata of a wrapped function
2. Decorators
   • The decorator syntax
   • Decorator factories
   • Import time and call time
   • Stacked decorators
3. Counting and timing
   • Counting calls
   • Timers, overhead and profiles
4. Caching
   • Memoisation
   • Cached objects and aliasing

Exercises with solutions