Fate of lambda, Functional Programming in Python...

[Anthony Baxter]

On Fri, 20 Aug 2004 12:50:02 -0400, Chas Emerick <cemerick at snowtide.com> wrote:
> In a comment off a post on lambda-the-ultimate, I noticed this little
> offhand remark:
> 
> '''IIRC GvR is going to kill the various lambda, map,filter & reduce
> leaving just generator expressions/list comprehension.'''

First point: lambda, map, filter and reduce won't go away before Python 3.0,
at the very least. And, to be honest, I suspect map/filter/reduce are much more
likely to die than lambda, as they can nearly always be expressed more clearly
as listcomps or genexprs. 

Having said that, and donning my interpreting-Guido-hat, the major problem
with lambda is the scoping issue. Nested scopes make this less of a problem.
In addition, the name 'lambda' was a poor poor choice.