why python annoys me

[D-Man]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2001 at 11:30:54AM -0700, James Logajan wrote:
| Alex Martelli wrote:
| > [...] since Python does have list comprehensions, [...]
| 
| Not being a computer scientist, I hope you can excuse a profoundly ignorant
| question, but what are (or is?) "list comprehensions"? And another question

They are described in the Ref Man (on python.org).  Someone gave a
pretty good explanation on this list, or on tutor at python.org.  Search
the archives if you want to find it.

Basically it is a syntacical sugar for creating a list whose elements
have a certain property and originally were in an existing list.

| (probably harder to answer): is there someplace on the web or in print where
| I can find a good definition of "functional programming"? I'm pretty sure it
| doesn't mean classical procedural notation, more like mathematical or
| logical notation, but I can't be sure.

It is rather similar to the notation used in defining functions in my
Discrete Math 2 course.  I would say that Lisp and Scheme are the most
widely known Functional Programming languages.  I think that the ML
family and maybe Haskell have something of FP in them, but I don't
really know much about those languages (just what I hear on this
group).

HTH,
-D