To add a small footnote to the existing replies to this comment: A related, but slightly different, function in the `functools` module (part of the Python standard library) is the `partial` function. It is like apply() but returns a function instead of calling the function and return its return value:

    f1 = partial(f, 1, 2)
    f2 = partial(f1, 3, 4)
    f2(5, 6)  # equivalent to f(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

It also supports kwargs.

How wouldn't * not compose as well as apply?