A critic of Guido's blog on Python's lambda

[Steve R. Hastings]

On Fri, 05 May 2006 21:16:50 -0400, Ken Tilton wrote:
> The upshot of 
> what he wrote is that it would be really hard to make semantically 
> meaningful indentation work with lambda.

Pretty much correct.  The complete thought was that it would be painful
all out of proportion to the benefit.

See, you don't need multi-line lambda, because you can do this:


def make_adder(x):
    def adder_func(y):
        sum = x + y
        return sum
    return adder_func

add5 = make_adder(5)
add7 = make_adder(7)

print add5(1)  # prints 6
print add5(10)  # prints 15
print add7(1)  # prints 8


Note that make_adder() doesn't use lambda, and yet it makes a custom
function with more than one line.  Indented, even.

You could also do this:


lst = []  # create empty list
def f(x):
    return x + 5
lst.append(f)
del(f)  # now that the function ref is in the list, clean up temp name

print lst[0](1)  # prints 6


Is this as convenient as the lambda case?

lst.append(lambda x: x + 7)
print lst[1](1)  # prints 8


No; lambda is a bit more convenient.  But this doesn't seem like a very
big issue worth a flame war.  If GvR says multi-line lambda would make
the lexer more complicated and he doesn't think it's worth all the effort,
I don't see any need to argue about it.



> But the key in the whole thread is simply that indentation will not 
> scale. Nor will Python.

This is a curious statement, given that Python is famous for scaling well.

I won't say more, since Alex Martelli already pointed out that Google is
doing big things with Python and it seems to scale well for them.
-- 
Steve R. Hastings    "Vita est"
steve at hastings.org    http://www.blarg.net/~steveha