I sing the praises of lambda, my friend and savior!

[Clark C. Evans]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2004 at 11:58:44AM -0700, Jeff Shannon wrote:
| >If you don't like lambda -- don't use it.   Just beacuse you are
| >unfamilar with a very helpful construct and are unwilling to learn
| >does not mean you should prevent others from continuing to enjoy 
| >one of the more pleasant aspects of Python.
| 
| Except that one of the design principles of Python is that it being easy 
| to *read* is more important than being easy to write

Exactly!  Lambdas make my code easy to read and therefore more
understandable.   I don't use them beacuse they are easier to write,
I use them beacuse they make reviewing source code easier:

  - they put simple expressions that are arguments right
    where they are used
    
  - they don't create random names that you have to worry 
    about name collision or finding something meaningful
    (and not distracting)
    
  - you are certain to know that the chunk of code is not
    used anywhere else, that is, you can freely modify it

Lambdas are all about making code more maintainable.

| Lambdas are hard to read, 

This is _your_ opinion; lots of other people disagree.

| because they're significantly different, 
| syntactically, from any other construct in the language 

This argument is just bogus.  There are lots of things in Python
that are significantly different from each other:

  - functions that return functoins, and hence can().be().chained()
  - using expressions as function arguments
  - list comprehensions
  - *args and **kwargs
  - overridable operators
  - classes, meta-classes
  - etc.

In any of these cases one _could_ of course, find a similar way
to do it with just a turning machine.  But this isn't the point,
the point is to give special syntax to common things that have
specific meaning so that they are easily recognized.

Best,

Clark