Lambda going out of fashion

[Alex Martelli]

Keith Dart <kdart at kdart.com> wrote:

> My personal gripe is this. I think the core language, as of 2.3 or 2.4
> is very good, has more features than most people will ever use, and they

Indeed, it has _too many_ features.  Look at the PEP about 3.0, and
you'll see that removing redundant features and regularizing a few
oddities is what it's meant to be all about.

> (Guido, et al.) can stop tinkering with it now and concentrate more on
> the standard libraries. 

No doubt the standard library needs more work, particularly if you count
the built-ins as being part of the library (which, technically, they
are).  Indeed, much of the redundancy previously mentioned is there
rather than in the core language strictly speaking -- e.g., all of the
things returning lists (from keys, values, items methods in dicts, to
the range built-in) mostly-duplicated with things returning iterators
(iterkeys, etc) or nearly so (xrange).  These are things that can't
change in 2.5 to avoid breaking backwards compatibility.  Other things,
where bw compat is not threatened, are no doubt going to be targeted in
2.5.


Alex