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

[Tom Anderson]

On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Terry Hancock wrote:

> Having said that, I too will miss the *concept* of an anonymous 
> function, although I wouldn't mind at all if its name changed, or if it 
> were somehow integrated into the "def" keyword's usage.  Using backticks 
> or some other syntax delimiter also sounds promising, although we're 
> sort of running out of them. ;-)

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.

tom

-- 
[Philosophy] is kind of like being driven behind the sofa by Dr Who - scary, but still entertaining. -- Itchyfidget