Of what use is 'lambda'???

[jurgen.defurne at philips.com]

The only time I have ever used a functional language was end 1992, begin 1993. I used
Prolog to make selections from an ASCII table which was imported from a mainframe
database table. I spent 14 evenings at home to master Prolog a bit. I could encode
in 2 or 3 lines what needed to be done, instead of some 50 in dBase. The reason
that we then went further with dBase, was that Turbo Prolog at that time had the 
expressive power to do the tasks, but was limited by DOS/PC. If you wanted
to process really large files, you ended up writing something difficult to handle
the file processing. Nowadays, with virtual memory that problem would only
exist for real large files.

If I really wanted to do functional programming in Python, I would have to take up
Prolog again, look how I would do it in Prolog (using lists), and then translate it
to Python. Python makes it (too?) easy to just do imperative programming.

Jurgen