Well, despite my parenthetical disclaimer, my attempted point was that the OP wanted to avoid replicating several functions that were mostly the same. I think Python's idiom of using a function to create and return callables is a comparable feature to using anonymous closures. Unfortunately, I guess the verbosity of the tallyFn calls was too much of a distraction. The cut-and-paste alternative (which the OP was trying to avoid) would be:
def tallyConsonant(): ....tally["consonant] += 1 def tallyVowel(): ....tally["vowel"] += 1 def tallyNotSure(): ....tally["notsure"] += 1 def tallyOther(): ....tally["other"] += 1 I was hoping to offer an example of the Pythonic function-returns-a-callable idiom, instead of having this discussion spiral down into another "what we really need are brace-enclosed anonymous enclosures" futility. -- Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
