PEP 312 - Making lambdas implicit worries me, surely it's just the name 'lambda' that is bad...

[Stephen Horne]

On Mon, 3 Mar 2003 11:34:18 +0300 (MSK), Roman Suzi <rnd at onego.ru>
wrote:

>
>If I understand correctly, functional-savvy (or even aware) people are
>minority of Python programmers. So all features which advance the FP
>paradigma will be countered by those who "do not need the feature".
>
>Will it lead to a FunPython fork in the future? I hope not!
>
>If FP in Python is indeed Guido's mistake, then lets deprecate lambda,
>map, filter, etc and ban function objects as function arguments/results.
>;-)
>
>Sincerely yours, Roman A.Suzi

My argument in starting this thread was not to ban functional
facilities - I *like* functional facilities.

I simply recognise that one significant argument against 'lambda' is
that it is a bad name which in itself raises some peoples hackles -
one of the points raised in the PEP. I think that a differently
spelled keyword would handle this problem better than an implicit
lambda because I feel that hiding the lambda is going to open a whole
new can of worms - programs that use lambdas will quite simply be
unreadable to those who are unfamiliar with lambdas because there
won't even be a 'hint' of what to look up in the manual - just an
obscure use of an already common piece of punctuation.

Believing that functional facilities are a good thing to have is quite
different to demanding that every Python programmer must be familiar
with them or else.

-- 
steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk