On Fri, 05 May 2006 21:16:50 -0400, Ken Tilton wrote:
> The upshot of
> what he wrote is that it would be really hard to make semantically
> meaningful indentation work with lambda.
Pretty much correct. The complete thought was that it would be painful
all out of proportion to the benefit.
See, you don't need multi-line lambda, because you can do this:
def make_adder(x):
def adder_func(y):
sum = x + y
return sum
return adder_func
add5 = make_adder(5)
add7 = make_adder(7)
print add5(1) # prints 6
print add5(10) # prints 15
print add7(1) # prints 8
Note that make_adder() doesn't use lambda, and yet it makes a custom
function with more than one line. Indented, even.
You could also do this:
lst = [] # create empty list
def f(x):
return x + 5
lst.append(f)
del(f) # now that the function ref is in the list, clean up temp name
print lst[0](1) # prints 6
Is this as convenient as the lambda case?
lst.append(lambda x: x + 7)
print lst[1](1) # prints 8
No; lambda is a bit more convenient. But this doesn't seem like a very
big issue worth a flame war. If GvR says multi-line lambda would make
the lexer more complicated and he doesn't think it's worth all the effort,
I don't see any need to argue about it.
> But the key in the whole thread is simply that indentation will not
> scale. Nor will Python.
This is a curious statement, given that Python is famous for scaling well.
I won't say more, since Alex Martelli already pointed out that Google is
doing big things with Python and it seems to scale well for them.
--
Steve R. Hastings "Vita est"
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.blarg.net/~steveha
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