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

[Jeff Shannon]

Antoon Pardon wrote:

>Op 2004-10-11, Jeff Shannon schreef <jeff at ccvcorp.com>:
>  
>
>>Lambdas are hard to read, because they're significantly different, 
>>syntactically, from any other construct in the language
>>    
>>
>
>I didn't find them so. On the other hand I find having to come up
>with a name for a function can be very inconvenient and not worth
>the trouble. If python wants functions to be full fledged objects,
>is needs some way to have unnamed functions, just as you can have
>unnamed lists, numbers, instances etc.
>
>Can you imaging the protest, from people if it would be decide
>that no unnamed entities van be used. If you want to use a number
>or a list, as an argument you first have to name it and then use
>the name as argument. Well the reason for having anonymous numbers
>and lists is the same reason for having anonymous functions.
>  
>

Functions are at a different level of granularity than numbers and 
lists.  Anonymity makes sense for numbers and lists; it makes less sense 
for collections of numbers and lists; and it makes still less sense for 
organized collections of numbers, lists, and operations thereon, which 
are structured in a meaningful way to express some (part of an) 
algorithm.  Similarly, I don't expect each line of code to have an 
individual name, but once I collect lines of code into a file, I 
certainly *do* expect to name that file, even if the file is only one or 
two lines long.

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International