So I've cooked up some very simple functions to add to functools - to expand it into a more general-purpose module.

def cat(x): return x

class nullfunc(object): def __call__(self, *args, **kargs): return self def __getattr__(self, name): return getattr(None, name)

def multimap(func, seq, n=2): assert n > 0, "n must be positive" if n == 1: return map(func, seq) else: return map(lambda x: multimap(func, x, n-1), seq)

def multifilter(func, seq, n=2): return multimap(lambda x: filter(func, x), seq, n-1)

def multireduce(func, seq, n=2): return multimap(lambda x: reduce(func, x), seq, n-1)

In an expression, cat achieves the effect of doing nothing - which makes it a nice default value for some filter-like functions. It's not a huge improvement - lambda x: x is almost as trivial to define, but I think it would be nice to have a standard identity function that all of Python could recognize.

nullfunc is a function that *chomps* away at its input while otherwise retaining the properties of None - much like the recently proposed callable None - except not as disasterous to existing practices and potentially more useful as an optional behavior. This is something that cannot be as quickly implemented as the cat function.

multimap is a multi-dimensional mapping function that recursively decends a sequence and applies a function to the data within.

multifilter is a multi-dimensional filter function that recursively descends a sequence and applies a function to the data within

multireduce - well... you get the idea

A better place to put some of these functions might be __builtin__, so you don't have to waste time importing something as basic as cat.