On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 3:43 PM, Mark H Harris <harrismh...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 3/24/14 4:03 AM, Ian Kelly wrote: >> >> >> The difference does not really lie in the lambda construct per se but in >> the binding style of closures. Functional languages tend to go one way >> here; imperative languages tend to go the other. {snip} > > >> The result may be more surprising to users accustomed to functional >> languages, but I claim that it is *less* surprising to users of other >> imperative languages. > > > Aside from the sin of spelling out "lambda," > should be ( \x y -> x + y ) a b ) but, neither here nor there...
Well no, it *should* be λx y . x + y but apparently some people don't have that character on their keyboards, so it gets written as lambda or \ instead. Personally I dislike the \ style; it doesn't really resemble a λ that closely, and to me the backslash denotes escape sequences and set differences. Nor is Python alone in spelling out lambda: Scheme and Common Lisp spell it the same way. As far as I know the \ for λ is unique to Haskell. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list