"Steven Bethard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > OTOH, I fully agree with Peter Hansen: "Really, the name is such a > trivial, unimportant part of this whole thing that it's hardly worth > discussing."
>From a certain viewpoint, I would agree. Yet, the word 'lambda' *is* the center of most of the fuss. For beginners, it is a minor issue: learn it and move on. But for some functionalists, it is a major issue. They 'know' that lambda means 'expressionized anonymous function'. And in lambda calculus, it is the main actor. But in Python, lambda only means anonymous trivial function. It is only an expressionized convenience abbreviation for an important but small subset of possible functions. So for years, such knowledgeable people have called for and proposed various syntaxes for 'proper lambdas' or 'true lambdas', saying pretty clearly that what Python has is improper or false. Would there have been so much fuss if the keyword had been 'fun' and the word 'lambda' had never appeared in the Python docs? I strongly doubt it. I also suspect that the years of fuss over Python's lambda being what it is rather that what it is 'supposed' to be (and is in other languages) but is not, has encourage Guido to consider just getting rid of it. I personally might prefer keeping the feature but using a different keyword. Terry J. Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
