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 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list