Is it possible to emulate bind in Lua?

Question

Given a lua function with one argument, is it possible to bind this argument to a fixed value to obtain a function without arguments?

More generally, how do I bind certain input arguments of a lua function to certain values?

Answer 1

Yes, this can be done in pretty much any language that have functions as first-class values.

function f1(a)
   return a+1
end

function bind(a)
   return function() return f1(a) end
end

local f2 = bind(42)
print(f2())
-- 43

This particular example works with specific function and number of arguments, but can easily be extended to take arbitrary function/arguments instead.