[RE:"using" keyword].Setting it off with a new keyword, or expanding the use of lambda is really a mandatory way of signifying this INTENT.
Your claim that this is somehow something new seems to be overlooking Lisp and Smalltalk, as well as Ruby which was mentioned in the quoted blog post.
Acknowledged. However, the power of such a language as Lisp is under-appreciated (as I think all who know it can agree), and the problem with it (and the challenge of language design in general) is how best to *orgranize* that power; i.e. that generality. In my view, Lisp is like assembly language for the mind. It's powerful, but not easily organized or visualized into a fashion where one can see and evaluate the building up of and into higher-level constructs. MY point was really about how the programming art *itself* hasn't fully explored this concept to even be able to *evaluate* the power and usefulness of employing techniques such as code blocks. To me, Python and Ruby are both exciting and interesting examples of how language design is evolving to find ways to express and evolve that power. In my mind, there is no doubt that languages will have to find elegant ways to express that power. What's cool about Python and Ruby is that it's taking that vast general space of the "mind's assembly language" and distilling it down into nicely manageble and elegant chunks of language syntax. The concept of distinct, passable code blocks is a nice example of that compression, one that certainly has correspondence within our biology. Thanks for the dialog though... marcos