Thank you -- I'm not quite sure they are "questionable", but they do have limited use in the language, and far less use then they did back in the early days of Python. In fact, most of the uses I've seen of lambda in recent code (particularly from newbies) is totally unnecessary.

If the only thing this proposal is about is a way to create small anonymous functions without using the keyword "lambda" -- it is pretty darn pointless.

And frankly, this compact notation is a lot harder (for me at least) to parse at a glance -- "lambda" may be a strange and confusing word for newbies, but it's easy to look up, and it's really obvious that *something* is going on there. Whereas parentheses are used all over the place, and are often optional. And more "line noise"-like symbols like => isn't really going to help.

In fact, I've only written a smattering of C, but it still requires some extra thinking to identify where a function is being defined -- a keyword (like def) would be so much more clear to me.

Final point:

Python has been around a long time, there's a lot of code already written -- any changes to syntax should only be ones that add real functionality or expressiveness -- a slightly-easier-to-write (and maybe read) anonymous function syntax is nowhere near that threshold.

-Chris B