On Feb 16, 10:41 pm, Andrej Mitrovic <andrej.mitrov...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Feb 16, 7:38 pm, Casey Hawthorne <caseyhhammer_t...@istar.ca> > wrote: > > > Interesting talk on Python vs. Ruby and how he would like Python to > > have just a bit more syntactic flexibility. > > >http://blog.extracheese.org/2010/02/python-vs-ruby-a-battle-to-the-de... > > -- > > Regards, > > Casey > > Gary's friend Geoffrey Grosenbach says in his blog post (which Gary > linked to): "Python has no comparable equivalent to Ruby’s do end > block. Python lambdas are limited to one line and can’t contain > statements (for, if, def, etc.). Which leaves me wondering, what’s the > point?" > > I'm sorry, lambda's do support if's and for's. Also, lambda's are > expressions, not statements, but you can pass them around, keep them > in a dictionary if you want to. And if you need more than one line of > statements, for crying out loud use a def? And who needs those "do- > end" blocks anyway, trying to turn Python into Pascal?
I think there are some nice use-cases for anonymous functions / blocks. First, mentioned above, is pretty DSL. And the second is using blocks in map/reduce functions. Yes, you can pass there a function but I believe that in most situations it is more readable to pass a multiline anonymous function / block than defined somewhere function written only for a single map/reduce operation. And often when you use reduce it is a bit more complicated then just one line function. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
