Securing a future for anonymous functions in Python

Steven Bethard steven.bethard at gmail.com
Fri Jan 7 10:44:57 EST 2005


Alan Gauld wrote:
> On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 21:02:46 -0600, Doug Holton <a at b.c> wrote:
> 
>>used, but there are people who do not like "lambda":
>>http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/view/419#comment-3069
>>The word "lambda" is meaningless to most people.  Of course so is "def", 
>>which might be why Guido van Robot changed it to "define": 
>>http://gvr.sourceforge.net/screen_shots/
> 
> 
> The unfamiliar argument doesn't work for me. After all most
> people are unfamiliar with complex numbers (or imaginary) numbers
> but python still provides a complex number type. Just because the
> name is unfamiliar to some doesn't mean we shouldn't use the
> term if its the correct one for the concept.

I'm not sure this is really a fair comparison.  What's the odds that if 
you're unfamiliar with complex numbers that you're going to have to read 
or write code that uses complex numbers?  Probably pretty low.  I don't 
think I've ever had to read or write such code, and I *do* understand 
complex numbers.  Lambdas, on the other hand, show up in all kinds of 
code, and even though I hardly ever use them myself, I have to 
understand them because other people do (over-)use them.

Steve



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