Draft Pep (was: Re: Let's Talk About Lambda Functions!)

[Jonathan Hogg]

On 5/8/2002 13:04, in article uksq9hd90t6d57 at news.supernews.com, "John Roth"
<johnroth at ameritech.net> wrote:

> "François Pinard" <pinard at iro.umontreal.ca> wrote in message
> news:mailman.1028514788.29672.python-list at python.org...
> 
>> If the rationale is essentially reduced to the vague statement of a
>> "continuous interest", it is a pretty weak rationale.  Before anything
>> else, the rationale should stress, in very convincing ways, why
>> anonymous functions should grow stronger in Python, instead of being
>> faded out.
> 
> "Continuous interest" is hardly vague. All one has to do is look up
> the subject on google groups, and  you'll find it popping up with
> remarkable frequency.

There are a number of topics that come up on this group with alarming
frequency, amongst them: how significant whitespace sucks, why we should
ditch colons, and that the GIL should be done away with.

Just because it's a frequent topic doesn't necessarily make it a compelling
argument for "fixing". I agree that "continuous interest" is very vague in
terms of rationale. I don't mean to denigrate the proposal, but it will be
much stronger if it contains hard arguments in its favour.

You should also address the concerns that have been raised here about the
idea, and you should obtain some good realistic examples. As noted by
someone else, the only example is trivial and has identical semantics to a
normal function definition.

The weight of opinion is almost always in favour of leaving the language
alone - and to prevent feeping creaturitis this is the sensible approach. So
if you want to introduce something new you'll have to really sell it.

Jonathan