> Wow... I had to click this e-mail just because I saw the first posts on the > mentioned thread and could see it turning for the worst..
Hi everyone, So let's try to squash this one now. There are more interesting problems to solve. Or other flame wars to fight. Let me see if we can do something constructive. I've been doing a shallow, superficial study of the Ruby language at the moment. One of the things I've been impressed about is that they've managed to make lambdas look non-threatening to people with their syntactic sugar of "code blocks". For example, ## Ruby ##################### def twice yield yield twice { puts "hello world" } ############################# This prints out "hello world" twice in a row: the twice() function takes in an implicit "code block", which it can later call by using their 'yield' statement. What the Ruby folks are doing is trying to make the use of higher-order procedures look really simple. In fact, most of the encouraged idiom style I've seen so far extensively uses this code style pervasively (especially for iteration), and that's very admirable. The exact functionality can be done in Python, but it does look a little more intimidating at first: ## Python def twice(f): f() f() twice(lambda: sys.stdout.write("hello world\n")) This does the same thing, but it looks a little scarier because the concepts needed to grasp his are superficially harder than that in the Ruby code. Anyway, let's derail off this regex flamewar and get us back to talking about code and about stuff that actually matters, like learning how to use functions well.. *wink* _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor