lambda and for that matter goto not forgetting sugar

[Philip Smith]

I've read with interest the continuing debate about 'lambda' and its place 
in Python.

Just to say that personally I think its an elegant and useful construct for 
many types of programming task (particularly number theory/artificial 
intelligence/genetic algorithms)

I can't think why anyone would be proposing to do away with it.  Sometimes 
an anonymous function is just what you need and surely it just reflects the 
python philosophy of everything being an object (in this case a code 
object).

Mind you my particular programming interest is algorithmic programming, I 
have no idea whether Lambda is of any relevance to eg client server 
programming.

For that matter I would find implementing the classical algorithms far 
easier if python had 'goto' (I'll wait for the guffaws to subside before 
mentioning that no lesser guru than Donald Knuth writes his algorithms that 
way - naturally so because it reflects what the machine does at the base 
level).  Please don't suggest using try/except as an alternative as the 
ugliness and inappropriateness of that to achieve a simple 'goto' is utterly 
out of keeping with the 'cleanliness' which is Python's most appealing 
feature.

(And yes - I do like spaghetti but only to eat, not in my code).

Following on naturally from that last point I would also like to 'deprecate' 
the use of the expression 'syntactic sugar' on these pages.  All high level 
languages (Python included) are nothing but syntactic sugar designed to 
conceal the ugliness of what actually gets sent to the CPU to make it all 
happen.

On a positive note though - I have found this newsgroup an invaluable aid to 
learning Python over the last few weeks and the response to queries has been 
as quick as it has been informative.

I've decided I like Python - in fact I think of it more as syntactic maple 
syrup than sugar.

Competition:  Has anyone found anything you can't do in the language?

regards to all

Phil