I've read with interest the continuing debate about 'lambda' and its place
in Python.
Just to say that personally I think its an elegant and useful construct for
many types of programming task (particularly number theory/artificial
intelligence/genetic algorithms)
I can't think why anyone would be proposing to do away with it. Sometimes
an anonymous function is just what you need and surely it just reflects the
python philosophy of everything being an object (in this case a code
object).
Mind you my particular programming interest is algorithmic programming, I
have no idea whether Lambda is of any relevance to eg client server
programming.
For that matter I would find implementing the classical algorithms far
easier if python had 'goto' (I'll wait for the guffaws to subside before
mentioning that no lesser guru than Donald Knuth writes his algorithms that
way - naturally so because it reflects what the machine does at the base
level). Please don't suggest using try/except as an alternative as the
ugliness and inappropriateness of that to achieve a simple 'goto' is utterly
out of keeping with the 'cleanliness' which is Python's most appealing
feature.
(And yes - I do like spaghetti but only to eat, not in my code).
Following on naturally from that last point I would also like to 'deprecate'
the use of the expression 'syntactic sugar' on these pages. All high level
languages (Python included) are nothing but syntactic sugar designed to
conceal the ugliness of what actually gets sent to the CPU to make it all
happen.
On a positive note though - I have found this newsgroup an invaluable aid to
learning Python over the last few weeks and the response to queries has been
as quick as it has been informative.
I've decided I like Python - in fact I think of it more as syntactic maple
syrup than sugar.
Competition: Has anyone found anything you can't do in the language?
regards to all
Phil