--- Josiah Carlson <jcarlson@uci.edu> wrote:
Technically speaking, lambda is sufficient for turing completeness [...]
...as is Perl, or machine code, to pick sort of opposite ends of the spectrum :)
Is that reduction worthwhile? I personally don't think so, but my list comprehensions tend to have fairly minimal predicates. One thing to take into consideration is that Guido has previously shot down 'order by' syntax in list comprehensions and generator expressions because he didn't think that they were Pythonic (I seem to remember 'ugly' and 'worthless', but maybe that was my response to them).
:) I am only expressing my own aesthetics, and I would certainly defer to Guido on most matters aesthetic, since he's written an aesthetically beautiful language. But having said that, I don't want my proposal automatically lumped in with every proposal that Guido has found unaesthetic, or rejected, and I believe he has even been known to change his mind from time to time. For all the real-world warts of SQL, I think SQL is a very aesthetically pleasing way to express transformations of relational data structures, and Python contains relational data structures, and therefore I think Python can benefit from using SQL as just one way of expressing relational transformations (and I'm still a little bit TIMTOWTDI from my Perl days, I fully admit). I fully concede all the obvious objections--more syntax, more ways to do it, difficulty of implementing it within the VM, ability of people to already manipulate relational data structures more cleanly than me in Python, etc. I'm not asking for this in Fall 2007, BTW, I'm expressing this as a vision for a bigger, better Python, maybe year 2010, even though smaller is usually better. And syntactically, I am only extending the language by one keyword, or one new way of triple-quoting. For my own use, native SQL would benefit the clarity of my (already working, but sometimes ugly) code more than some other additions proposed in Py3k, but YMMV. ____________________________________________________________________________________ Finding fabulous fares is fun. Let Yahoo! FareChase search your favorite travel sites to find flight and hotel bargains. http://farechase.yahoo.com/promo-generic-14795097