Ben Bacarisse <ben.use...@bsb.me.uk> writes: > By replying I'm not accepting the premise -- I have no idea if there > is widespread fear and suspicion of lambdas among Python users but it > seems unlikely.
I can testify, as the person who started this thread, that there is no fear or suspicion of lambda here. I use it quite frequently without qualm for creating self-explanatory functions that need no name. Rather, the motivation was that a complex thing, with many moving parts, has an unexplained implementation: a nested set of functions without names to explain their part in the pattern. That these are then immediately bound to a name, to me defeats the purpose of using lambda in the first place. If you want a named function, lambda is not the tool to reach for; we have the ‘def’ statement for that. But by using ‘lambda’ the author avoided one of the more important parts of publishing the code: making it readable and self-explanatory. If they'd chosen a name for each function, that would at least have prompted them to explain what they're doing. So ‘lambda’ is great, and I use it without worry for creating simple self-explanatory nameless functions. But it's not the right tool for this job: This is not self-explanatory, and the component functions should not be nameless. -- \ “It is forbidden to steal hotel towels. Please if you are not | `\ person to do such is please not to read notice.” —hotel, | _o__) Kowloon, Hong Kong | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
