A friendlier, sugarier lambda -- a proposal for Ruby-like blocks in python

[Kay Schluehr]

brenocon at gmail.com wrote:

> But [embedding a definition, ks] is awkward since the lambda is constrained to be one
> line; you
> can't come back later and add much to the callback's code.
> Furthermore, this example isn't even legal, because 'print' isn't a
> function, but a statement -- lambda is further constrained to only
> contain an expression.
>
> Many have complained about this crippled-ness of lambda, but it
> actually makes some sense.  Since Python uses colons and indentation to
> define blocks of code, it would be awkward to close a multiline lambda.
>  The best I could think of would look like
>
>     deferred.addCallback(lambda r:
>         print("fancy formatting %s" % r.text)
>     )
>
>     ^
>     |
>
> That trailing paranthesis is WAY un-Pythonic.

Maybe it is not common place because some users are underinformed and
hypnotized by whitespace semantics but you can add a trailing backslash
to achieve line coninuation within a single expression:

>>> deferred.addCallback(lambda r:  puts("fancy formatting %s" \
... 	))

This works syntactically.

[...]

> There might be some sort of overlap with PEP 343 and the 'with'
> statement, but I'm not sure exactly.  Sorry I'm late to the game and
> commenting on last year's PEP's, but I've only started reading them.
> Note that PEP's 343 and 340 are very focused on resource management --
> but I think that letting one define code blocks as closures could make
> resource handling routines be easily written in Python.

The with statement is already implemented in Python 2.5.

http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/pep-343.html

The main difference between the with statement and Ruby blocks is that
the with-statement does not support loops. Yielding a value of a
function decorated with a contextmanager and passing it to the BLOCK of
the with statement is essentially a one-shot. Therefore you can't use
the with statement to define iterators. It is not a lightweight visitor
pattern replacement as it is in Ruby. Hence the with- and the
for-statement are orthogonal to each other in Python.