On Fri, 07 Jan 2005 08:44:57 -0700, Steven Bethard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The unfamiliar argument doesn't work for me. After all most > > people are unfamiliar with complex numbers (or imaginary) numbers > > complex numbers. Lambdas, on the other hand, show up in all kinds of > code, and even though I hardly ever use them myself, I have to > understand them because other people do (over-)use them.
That's a fair point I suppose but I still don't see much point in introducing new names and syntaxes when the existing name is a sensible one, even if unfamiliar to many. After all it works in Lisp and Haskell - Haskell even uses Lambda as its emblem... And besides it may just encoursage some to go and explore Lambda calculus, it did for me... And my programing improved enormously as a result. So maybe having the name as a stimulant to research is a good thing... OTOH I do accept the point made by another poster that Pythons single expression limitations mean that they are a poor imitation of lambdas in other languages. And provided I get some kind of anonymous code block to pass around I don't care too much if the name lambda disappears, provided the concept remains! And the syntax is reasonably simple to use where lambdas get used now. (Without lambdas of any kind I might finally make the jump to Ruby that I've been toying with for a while but I just hate those Perl-like @ symbols...) <OT::Aside> We often see people stating that programming shouldn't be called a science because there is no mathematical basis, such claimants usually haven't seen Predicate or Lambda calculus. I know, I used to be in that category and while I don't explicitly use either when programming (or only rarely) awareness of the principles suddenly made a lot of the "rules of programming" that I'd been taught make perfect sense (no side-effects, avoid globals, etc) Its like the fact that I rarely use Maxwell's equations when designing electronic circuits - but its nice to know what the underlying theory is actually based on! </Aside> All IMHO of course! :-) Alan G. Author of the Learn to Program website http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
