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

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On Sat, 06 May 2006 23:05:59 -0700, Alex Martelli wrote:
> Tomasz Zielonka <tomasz.zielonka at gmail.com> wrote:
>    ...
>> higher level languages. There are useful programming techniques, like
>> monadic programming, that are infeasible without anonymous functions.
>> Anonymous functions really add some power to the language.
> 
> Can you give me one example that would be feasible with anonymous
> functions, but is made infeasible by the need to give names to
> functions?  In Python, specifically, extended with whatever fake syntax
> you favour for producing unnamed functions?

Monads are one of those parts of functional programming I've never really
got my head around, but as I understand them, they're a way of
transforming what looks like a sequence of imperative programming
statements that operate on a global state into a sequence of function
calls that pass the state between them.

So, what would be a statement in an imperative language is an anonymous
function that gets added to the monad, and then, when the monad is run,
these functions get executed. The point being, that you have a lot of
small functions (one for each statement) which are likely not to be used
anywhere else, so defining them as named functions would be a bit of a
pain in the arse.

Actually, defining them as unnamed functions via lambdas would be annoying
too, although not as annoying as using named functions - what you really
want is macros, so that what looks like a statement can be interpreted is
a piece of code to be executed later.

Here, for instance, is an article about using scheme (and, in particular,
macros), to produce a fairly elegant monad implementation:

http://okmij.org/ftp/Scheme/monad-in-Scheme.html