map/filter/reduce/lambda opinions and background unscientific mini-survey

[Terry Hancock]

On Tuesday 05 July 2005 03:43 pm, Tom Anderson wrote:
> I understand that the backslash is popular in some ivory-tower functional 
> languages. Currently, a backslash can be used for explicit line joining, 
> and is illegal elsewhere on a line outside a string literal, so i think 
> it's available for this. It would be utterly unpythonic to use puntuation 
> instead of a keyword, and it would make no sense to novices, but it would 
> scare the crap out of C programmers, which has to be worth something.

With list comprehensions and generators becoming so integral, I'm
not sure about "unpythonic".  And a syntax just occured to me --
what about this:

[y*x for x,y]

?

(that is:

[<expression> for <argument list>]

It's just like the beginning of a list comprehension or generator, but
without the iterator.  That implies that one must be given, and
the result is therefore a callable object.

Wouldn't do anything more or less than present day "lambda", but
gets rid of the weird keyword, and integrates nicely with list comps
and generators.  It's currently a syntax error, and it requires no 
special delimiter -- it's really just an extension of list comp syntax.

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