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

[Alex Martelli]

M Jared Finder <jared at hpalace.com> wrote:
   ...
> Your reasoning, taken to the extreme, implies that an assembly language,
> by virtue of having the fewest constructs, is the best designed language

Except that the major premise is faulty!  Try e.g.
<http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-5477/6mkuavhrf#hic> and count the
number of distinct instructions -- general purpose, floating point,
SIMD, MMX, SSE, SSE2, OS support... there's *hundreds*, each with its
own rules as to what operand(s) are allowed plus variants such as (e.g.)
cmovbe{w,l,q} for "conditional move if below or equal" for word, long,
quadword (no byte variant) -- but e.g cmpxchg{b,w,l,q} DOES have a byte
variant too, while setbe for "set if below or equal" ONLY has a byte
variant, etc, etc -- endless memorization;-).

When you set up your strawman arguments, try to have at least ONE of the
premises appear sensible, will you?-)

I never argued against keeping languages at a high level, of course
(that's why your so utterly unfounded argument would be a "strawman"
even if it WAS better founded;-).

> prone, code.  I think the advantages of anonymous functions:
   ...
> e) making the language simpler to implement

Adding one construct (e.g., in Python, having both def and lambda with
vast semantic overlap, rather than just one) cannot "make the language
simpler to implement" -- no doubt this kind of "reasoning" (?) is what
ended up making the instruction-set architecture of the dominant
families of CPUs so bizarre, intricate, and abstruse!-)


Alex