[BangPypers] if not with comparision statement in python

[Dhananjay Nene]

On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 7:26 PM, Anand Balachandran Pillai
<abpillai at gmail.com> wrote:
>  IMHO, map/filter/reduce and the inevitable companion lambda were
>  added on to Python when it was still trying to find its identity on where
>  it stood in the pantheon of dynamic typed languages - since it wanted
>  to be everything for everyone it borrowed some of these constructs
>  from Lisp or other functional languages.
>
>  With addition of list comps, generators etc, these right now stand
>  out like sore thumbs in the language and should be got ridden
>  of at the earliest.

I am certain there are contrary opinions, even though the BDFL has
weighed in. So yes, python is unlikely to be the playground for these
constructs. I find a degree of elegance and utility to these
constructs, though it is as well likely that these may seem like sore
thumbs to others.

>  Also, using any of the m/f/r trio with lambda is a performance killer.
>  See an earlier post in a different thread for more on this.

Its a performance killer only for cPython - its a function of runtime
not the construct. cPython is likely to stay a poorly performing
runtime for these. I do hope PyPy will fare much better - but that
remains to be seen.  These constructs also help parallelisation (but
only when combined with immutability), and thats a feature python is
likely to be therefore unable to implement as far as I can imagine. Is
this a big deal - frankly no, since the sweet spot of python is pretty
broad.