I replied a few minutes ago thanking everyone for their pointers. Very interesting reading. I don't see my post yet, so I do hope it comes through. I'm using a new newsreading service and don't yet have confidence in it.
In any case, the addition of the default-setting argument in the lambda works famously and is only a slight modification to my code. While I don't think it's particularly intuitive (I would hate to be a hypothetical programmer trying to puzzle out what my code does), it gets the job done and is a heck of a lot easier than attaching the list of attributes manually as I would've done without Python's FP capabilities. Thanks again, Ted -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
