On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 11:56 PM, Pavol Lisy <pavol.lisy@gmail.com> wrote:
On 7/13/16, Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
I don't support this lambda proposal (in this moment - but probably> Pavol Lisy <pavol.lisy@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Questions around "only one possibilities how to write it" could be
>> probably answered with this?
>>
>> a<b
>> a.__lt__(b)
>
> The maxim is not “only one way”. That is a common misconception, but it
> is easily dispelled: read the Zen of Python (by ‘import this’ in the
> interactive prompt).
>
> Rather, the maxim is “There should be one obvious way to do it”, with a
> parenthetical “and preferably only one”.
>
> So the emphasis is on the way being *obvious*, and all other ways being
> non-obvious. This leads, of course, to choosing the best way to also be
> the one obvious way to do it.
>
> Your example above supports this: the comparison ‘a < b’ is the one
> obvious way to compare whether ‘a’ is less than ‘b’.
>
> --
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> Ben Finney
>
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somebody could convince me).
I don't either, but I'm glad it was brought up regardless...
But if we will accept it then Unicode version could be the obvious one
couldn't be?
I certainly hope not. As a user with no lambda key on my keyboard, the only way that I know to input one is to do a google search for "unicode greek letter lambda" and copy/paste one of those characters into my editor :-).
FWIW, I think that the cons here far outweigh the pros -- As a former physicist, when I see a lambda character, I immediately think of a whole host of things (wavelength!) and none of them is "anonymous function". Perhaps someone who works more with lambda calculus (or with a more rigorous comp-sci background) would disagree -- but my point is that this notation would possibly only serve a small community -- and it could possibly break code for another small group of users who are using lambdas as variable names to be clever (which is another practice that I wouldn't support...) and finally, I think it might just be confusing for other people (1-character non-ascii keywords? If my editor's syntax definition wasn't up-to-date, I'd definitely expect a `SyntaxError` from that).
All of that aside, it seems like the pros that the original poster mentioned could be gained by writing a plugin for your editor that makes the swap on save and load. Apparently this already exists for some editors -- Why risk breaking existing code to add a syntax that can be handled by an editor extension?
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