[Python-Dev] Let's just keep lambda (original) (raw)

Greg Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
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! :-)

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

-- 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 +--------------------------------------+

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