[Python-3000] Possible alternative lambda syntax?

[Guido van Rossum]

Yes, you're beating a dead horse. Everybody's been hinting at that but
you don't seem to want to hear it. So, again, please stop this
discussion while you have an ounce of credibility left.

--Guido

On 1/13/07, Adam Atlas <adam at atlas.st> wrote:
>
> On 13 Jan 2007, at 12.05, Greg Falcon wrote:
> > On 1/13/07, Adam Atlas <adam at atlas.st> wrote:
> >> [lambda ideas snipped]
> >>
> >> Any thoughts on either of these?
> >
> > Replying privately instead of on the mailing list, because I'm not
> > trying to call you out in public or anything like that.
> >
> > But Guido wrote a great essay that covers what you're suggesting:
> > http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358
> >
> > Also you should take a look at PEP 3099 before suggesting features for
> > Python 3000.
> >
> > Greg F
>
> (Replying on the mailing list because being called out in public is
> fine with me. Especially by the guy who made "Irrational Exuberance"
> and "Dash". :P)
>
> Okay, I definitely understand Guido's point about switching to paying
> attention to indentation within an expression. I guess that could get
> very ugly. My suggestion for (a, b: a+b) syntax still stands; it
> seems unambiguous enough that we can simply drop the "lambda" keyword
> and the parentheses around the arglist, bringing a syntax that's not
> fundamentally very different from the current one, but quicker to
> write and visually more elegant and simple.
>
> As for allowing statements in lambdas, how about this -- the part
> after the colon can simply be a series of statements (separated by ;,
> not multiline). If so, the function is constructed from those
> statements, and it's expected to have a 'return' instead of just
> having the last statement be an expression. If, rather, the part
> after the colon is one expression, then it acts like it does now.
> It's minimally obtrusive; it doesn't really use any syntax that
> doesn't already exist, it just allows it in a different context.
>
> (Again, apologies if I'm beating a dead horse, or a Dead Parrot as
> the case may be, but these ideas don't seem too far-out to me; I
> could even try implementing this as a patch for the current Py3K
> codebase myself, probably.)
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)