[follow up from py3k.devel list] Neil Toronto wrote:

Yep. In my seven years of CS instruction so far, I've only come across this once, in a theory of programming languages course. "Lambda" simply doesn't show up unless you do language theory or program in a Lisp... or in Python.

Since you mention Haskell below:

It's a little less terse than Haskell's "\->"

it's worth pointing out that Haskell uses the backslash syntax because it is the nearest ASCII equivalent to the (lower-case) letter lambda. For example, see http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/More_on_functions or the Google results for "haskell lambda backslash" (without the quotes). Malte