Guido> I'll have to think about this more. lambda is annoying to me Guido> because it adds so little compared to writing a one-line def. Guido> But it makes sense for certain programming styles. Yes -- there are times when notational compactness greatly aids mental chunking. And of course there are other times when notational compactness stands in the way of comprehension. Sometimes a single notation can do both at once, depending on the reader's prior experience. Consider the following C statement: *p++ = *q++; If you're an experienced programmer, the meaning of this statement is immediately obvious; if not, it's obfuscation. Similarly, map(lambda x: x**2, data) is really obvious to some people, and confusing to others, as is [x**2 for x in data] -- Andrew Koenig, ark@research.att.com, http://www.research.att.com/info/ark