[Python-Dev] Let's just keep lambda

Fri Feb 10 05:05:22 CET 2006

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> To those people who believe that lambda is required in some situations
> because it behaves differently with respect to the surrounding scope
> than def: it doesn't, and it never did. This is (still!) a
> surprisingly common myth. I have no idea where it comes from; does
> this difference exist in some other language that has lambda as well
> as some other function definition mechanism?

Not that I know of. Maybe it's because these people first
encountered the concept of a closure in when using lambda in
Lisp or Scheme, and unconsciously assumed there was a
dependency.
> Parting shot: it appears that we're getting more and more
> expressionized versions of statements: ...
 > Perhaps we could add a try/except/finally
> expression, and allow assignments in expressions, and then we could
> rid of statements altogether, turning Python into an expression
> language. Change the use of parentheses a bit, and... voila, Lisp! :-)
> <duck>

Or we could go the other way and provide means of writing
all expressions as statements.
 call:
 foo
 x
 lambda y,z:
 w =:
 +:
 y
 z
 print:
 "Result is"
 w
<counter-duck>
-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+
University of Canterbury,	 | Carpe post meridiam! 	 |
Christchurch, New Zealand	 | (I'm not a morning person.) |
greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz	 +--------------------------------------+

[Python-Dev] Let's just *keep* lambda

[Python-Dev] Let's just keep lambda