Anonymous Functions

Now that you understand functions can be stored in variables and passed around, there's an even more concise way to write them. Instead of always giving a function a name, you can create it directly where you need it—these are called anonymous functions.

An anonymous function is simply a function without a name. You define it using the function keyword followed immediately by its parameters and body:

function(a, b)
    return a + b
end

This creates a function value that can be used right away. Anonymous functions are particularly useful when passing functions as arguments to other functions. Remember the custom sorting example from earlier? Here's how it looks with an anonymous function:

local players = {
    {name = "Alice", score = 150},
    {name = "Bob", score = 200},
    {name = "Charlie", score = 175}
}

table.sort(players, function(a, b)
    return a.score > b.score
end)

Instead of defining a separate named function for the comparison, the function is created directly as the second argument to table.sort(). This makes the code more compact and keeps the sorting logic right where it's used.