Fear and suspicion of lambdas, was Re: Meta decorator with parameters, defined in explicit functions

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Thursday, June 30, 2016 at 7:26:01 PM UTC+12, Peter Otten wrote:
> foo = lambda <args>: <expr>
> 
> there is syntactic sugar in Python that allows you to write it as
> 
> def foo(<args>):
>     return <expr>
> 
> with the nice side effects that it improves the readability of tracebacks 
> and allows you to provide a docstring.

True, but then again the original had three lambdas, so one line would have to become at least 3×2 = 6 lines, more if you want docstrings.

> def reduce(items, func=lambda x, y: x + y): ...

There was a reason why “reduce” was removed from being a builtin function in Python 2.x, to being banished to functools in Python 3.

> the alternative
> 
> def reduce(items, func=add): ...
> 
> looks more readable in my eyes even though somewhere ...

Just use “sum” in this case.