possibly trivial newbie list/array question

[Paul Rubin]

"Alex Martelli" <aleax at aleax.it> writes:
> A language is a huge collection of delicate balancing acts,
> of design compromises, among many conflicting objectives,
> including handiness and minimalism.  Reducing the need for
> lambda, and thus its frequence in idiomatic Python, by an
> order of magnitude, was no doubt a motivator here:-).

Ok, it's my perverse Scheme prejudices that make me think of lambda as
natural and list comprehension as looking too much like Perl (which
after all was what I came to Python to get away from <g>).  I've never
looked at Haskell but should do so one of these days.

> Reminds me of a debate the other way 'round a few months
> ago over on comp.lang.functional, where another guy was
> utterly convinced that the addition of list comprehensions
> to Python was THE major event in the history of Python, or
> something like that... of course, he did have a Haskell
> background in that case:-).

I'm not sure what he meant by that... :)