Newbie ?:A more concise way?

[Brian]

Carel Fellinger <cfelling at iae.nl> wrote in message news:<a611bl$44i$1 at animus.fel.iae.nl>...
> If it's performance and not code obfuscation you're after, maybe you'd
> better spent some time on profiling it.

Thanks Carel, I'll file your earlier suggestion under "code
obfuscation" then :)

Do you also feel my original code is better in terms of style or would
it be even better as the more verbose:

z = []
for i in xrange(y):
    z.append(MyClass())

OK - now I have another question (and remember I'm new to Python) if
map and lambda are part of the core language and have well defined
behavior, why is it that using them is considered bad form?  Are they
just the redheaded step-children of the language, or what? ;-)