Interesting talk on Python vs. Ruby and how he would like Python to have just a bit more syntactic flexibility.

[David Cournapeau]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 4:41 AM, Andrej Mitrovic
<andrej.mitrovich at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Gary's friend Geoffrey Grosenbach says in his blog post (which Gary
> linked to): "Python has no comparable equivalent to Ruby’s do end
> block. Python lambdas are limited to one line and can’t contain
> statements (for, if, def, etc.). Which leaves me wondering, what’s the
> point?"
>
> I'm sorry, lambda's do support if's and for's. Also, lambda's are
> expressions, not statements, but you can pass them around, keep them
> in a dictionary if you want to. And if you need more than one line of
> statements, for crying out loud use a def?

I think that's a bit of a strawman: the point made by the OP is that
it enables writing simple DSL easier, and the ruby's community seems
to value this. They are not advocating using anonymous functions where
"normal" functions would do.

cheers,

David