[Tutor] Cannot Understand

[Liam Clarke]

On 3/11/06, Pawel Kraszewski <Pawel_Kraszewski at wp.pl> wrote:
> Dnia piątek, 10 marca 2006 19:31, Edgar Antonio Rodriguez Velazco napisał:
>
> > f = lambda n: n-1 + abs(n-1) and f(n-1)*n or 1
>
> Oh God! This smells lispish! Haven't seen a jevel like this before, but I LOVE
> it!

Haha, hey, I've been learning Lisp and at least it'd have brackets in
places to make precedence easier to grok.

This reminds me, some friends and I were discussing various languages
and writing code that generates a string of the first five squares,
space delimited.

i.e.
x = []
for i in range(1, 6):
    w = str(i)
    x.append(w)
print " ".join(x)

Which rapidly turned into an obfuscation contest. I was amazed at how
obfuscated you could be in Python, thus proving the adage that you can
write Perl in any language.

A relatively intelligble one liner is
print " ".join([str(i * i) for item in range(1,6)])

A very obfuscated (using lambda and abusing a list comprehension) one is
[sys.stdout.write(str((lambda y: y*y)(x))+" ") for x in range(1,6)]

(But it also returns [None, None, None, None, None, None] )

And my favourite, because it looks like Lisp/Haskell -

print " ".join(map(str, map(lambda x: x*x, range(1,6))))

(My Common Lisp attempt was -
(string-trim "()" (write-to-string (loop for i from 1 to 5 collecting
(* i i)) :array T))

but I'm such a Lisp newbie it's not funny.)

/end OT