The built-in map() function is a higher-order function that applies a function to items from an iterable. We can think of the simple version of the map() function, as follows:
map = (lambda function, arg_iter: (function(a) for a in arg_iter))
This works well when the arg_iter parameter is an iterable that provides individual values. The actual map() function is a bit more sophisticated than this, and will work with a number of iterables.
The starmap() function in the itertools module is simply the *a version of the map() function. We can imagine the definition as follows:
starmap = (lambda function, arg_iter: (function(*a) for a in arg_iter))
This reflects a small shift in the semantics ...
