Flipping a function's argument order in Python

Question

Nowadays, I am starting to learn haskell, and while I do it, I try to implement some of the ideas I have learned from it in Python. But, I found this one challenging. You can write a function in Haskell, that takes another function as argument, and returns the same function with it's arguments' order flipped. Can one do similiar thing in Python? For example,

def divide(a,b):
    return a / b

new_divide = flip(divide)

# new_divide is now a function that returns second argument divided by first argument

Can you possibly do this in Python?

Answer 1

In a pure functional style:

flip = lambda f: lambda *a: f(*reversed(a))

def divide(a, b):
    return a / b

print flip(divide)(3.0, 1.0)

A bit more interesting example:

unreplace = lambda s: flip(s.replace)

replacements = ['abc', 'XYZ']
a = 'abc123'
b = a.replace(*replacements)
print b
print unreplace(b)(*replacements) # or just flip(b.replace)(*replacements)