PEP 312 - Making lambdas implicit worries me, surely it's just the name 'lambda' that is bad...

[Andrew Koenig]

Alex> (Hint: in case the point of how mere "differences in keystrokes"
Alex> can widely affect design choices in a language and its libraries
Alex> was lost on you; do you really think anyone would dream of
Alex> introducing a ternary operator if you could just do

Alex>  def when(cond, a,b):
Alex>      if cond: return a()
Alex>      else: return  b()

Alex>  res = when(cond, :b, :c)

Alex> instead of


Alex>  res = when(cond, lambda : b, lambda :c)

Alex> ?)

Yes, definitely.

What's wrong with   when(cond, :b, :c)   is that it's too easy to forget
one of the colons, in which case the error goes undiagnosed until the
corresponding branch is actually executed.

For that reason, although I wouldn't mind having a more compact way of
writing lambda-expressions, I don't think that the colon syntax is
the best way to do it.

-- 
Andrew Koenig, ark at research.att.com, http://www.research.att.com/info/ark