The partial() function leads to something called partial application. A partially applied function is a new function built from an old function and a subset of the required arguments. It is closely related to the concept of currying. Much of the theoretical background is not relevant here, since currying doesn't apply to the way Python functions are implemented. The concept, however, can lead us to some handy simplifications.

We can look at trivial examples as follows:

>>> exp2= partial(pow, 2)
>>> exp2(12)
4096
>>> exp2(17)-1
131071

We've created a function, exp2(y), which is the pow(2,y) function. The partial() function bounds the first positional parameter to the pow() function. When we evaluate the newly created exp2() function, we get values computed from the argument bound by the partial() function, plus the additional argument provided to the exp2() function.

The bindings of positional parameters are handed in a strict...