Hey folks, I'm sitting over here in the AppleScript talk and Jacob is explaining a module called 'appscript' that interfaces to the Apple Events system. What caught my eye was this example: from appscript import * ab = app('Address Book') people = ab.people.filter(its.emails != []) That last line asks the Address Book to select only entries with e-mail addresses. The weird 'its' object comes from the appscript module -- asking for its properties and using operators causes it to set up thunks for you. It dawned on me that you could use this idea to make the whole filter/lambda experience vastly more pleasant. I whipped up a quick implementation: >>> from placeholder import _ >>> numbers = [5, 9, 56, 34, 1, 24, 37, 89] >>> filter(_ < 30, numbers) [5, 9, 1, 24] >>> map(_ + 10, numbers) [15, 19, 66, 44, 11, 34, 47, 99] >>> Look ma, no lambdas! I bet someone has already done this before, right? -- ?!ng