Securing a future for anonymous functions in Python

[Terry Hancock]

On Friday 07 January 2005 06:12 pm, Jeff Shannon wrote:
> Paul Rubin wrote:
> 
> > Richard Feynman told a story about being on a review committee for
> > some grade-school science textbooks.  One of these book said something
> > about "counting numbers" and it took him a while to figure out that
> > this was a new term for what he'd been used to calling "integers".
> 
> With all due respect to Richard Feynman, I'd have thought that 
> "counting numbers" would be non-negative integers, rather than the 
> full set of integers...  which, I suppose, just goes to show how 
> perilous it can be to make up new, "more natural" terms for things. ;)

Speaking of "natural", I think "counting numbers" would indeed be
the "natural numbers" 1,2,3, ...

So, yeah, I agree.  Jargon definitely has its place: I once told a colleague
(in an effort to avoid jargon) that one star was "faster" than another star.

Only after registering his incomprehension, did I really think about the
fact that that had at least 4 or 5 possible meanings (in fact, I meant that
the frequency of its periodic change in radial velocity was higher -- but
I could've meant that it was receeding faster, had a higher amplitude of
radial velocity change, etc.).

I think "lambda" is fine.  Basically if you find you need one, you probably
ought to be using the CS term anyway.  It would make looking up the
theory that much easier, anyway.

Cheers,
Terry



-- 
--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com