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

[Paul Rubin]

aleaxit at yahoo.com (Alex Martelli) writes:
> I do hate it that
>     [ x for x in container if predicate(x) ]
> is an exact synonym of the more legible
>     list( x for x in container if predicate(x) )

Heh, I hate it that it's NOT an exact synonym (the listcomp leaves 'x'
polluting the namespace and clobbers any pre-existing 'x', but the
gencomp makes a new temporary scope).

> and the proposed
>     {1, 2, 3}
> is an exact synonym of
>     set((1, 2, 3))

There's one advantage that I can think of for the existing (and
proposed) list/dict/set literals, which is that they are literals and
can be treated as such by the parser.  Remember a while back that we
had a discussion of reading expressions like
  {'foo': (1,2,3),
  'bar': 'file.txt'}
from configuration files without using (unsafe) eval.  Aside from that
I like the idea of using constructor functions instead of special syntax.