[Tutor] Lambda

[alan.gauld@bt.com]

> Well, recursion is a profound, fundamental concept, lambda is 
> just a quick notation :)

Actually IMHO lambdas are profound fundamental concepts too
is just that Pythons half hearted way of implementing them 
makes them into "just a notation" - nested scopes do allow 
us to do most dynamic programming things now but disguise/hide
the important concept of execvutable code blocks.

Smalltalk or Lisp style lambdas can now be faked in Python
but by being faked the basic idea of an anonymous function
(or anonymous block of code) being treated as an object is 
in danger of being lost! Without that dynamic programming, 
functional programming and self modifying code all becomes 
much harder to comprehend IMHO.

Now none of these are concepts for the raw beginner to worry 
about but one of the great things about Python is that 
the beginner doesn't usually have to learn a new language 
to learn a new, advanced concept. But with broken lambdas 
that was necessary, now its not necessary but may still be desirable...

:-(

Alan G