Python's DSLs (was: A critic of Guido's blog on Python's lambda)

[Cameron Laird]

In article <1hewvsx.11x9f301gbjrhqN%aleaxit at yahoo.com>,
Alex Martelli <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote:
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>Of course, the choice of Python does mean that, when we really truly
>need a "domain specific little language", we have to implement it as a
>language in its own right, rather than piggybacking it on top of a
>general-purpose language as Lisp would no doubt afford; see
><http://labs.google.com/papers/sawzall.html> for such a DSLL developed
>at Google. However, I think this tradeoff is worthwhile, and, in
>particular, does not impede scaling.
>
>
>Alex

You lost me, Alex.

I recognize that most of this thread has been far away, in the
land of the anonymity of function definitions, and so on.  I've
redirected follow-ups to clp.

On this one isolated matter, though, I'm confused, Alex:  I sure
think *I* have been writing DSLs as specializations of Python,
and NOT as "a language in its own right".  Have I been fooling
myself, or are you making the point that Lisp-based DSLs live in
a larger syntactic universe than Python's, or ...?