domain articles this author wrote in the son which portions of this report are based these includethe first of my book text processing in pythonwhich discusses functional programming for text processingin the section titled "utilizing higher-order functions in text processing also wrote several articlesmentioned by kuchlingfor ibm' developerworks site that discussed using functional programming in an early version of python xcharming pythonfunctional programming in pythonpart making more out of your favorite scripting language charming pythonfunctional programming in pythonpart wading into functional programmingcharming pythonfunctional programming in pythonpart currying and other higher-order functions not mentioned by kuchlingand also for an older version of pythoni discussed multiple dispatch in another article for the same column the implementation created there has no advantages over the more recent multipledispatch librarybut it provides longer conceptual explanation than this report cancharming pythonmultiple dispatchgeneralizing polymorphism with multimethods stylistic note as in most programming textsa fixed font will be used both for inline and block samples of codeincluding simple command or function names within code blocksa notional segment of pseudocode is indicated with word surrounded by angle brackets ( not valid python)such as in other casessyntactically valid but undefined functions are used with descriptive namessuch as get_the_data(viii preface