Re: Python becoming less Lisp-like

From: James Graves (ansible_at_typhoon.xnet.com)
Date: 03/15/05 

Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 15:31:07 +0000 (UTC)

Fernando <frr@easyjob.net> wrote:

> Peter Seibel <peter@gigamonkeys.com> wrote:
>
> > Looks like the BDFL is planning to take lambda, reduce, filter, and
> > map out of Python in the next big rev of Python (so called Python
> > 3000):
> >
> > <http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196>
>
>Basically, it says that it will get rid of the explicit map, filter
>and reduce and substitute them by some syntactic sugar that uses them
>implicitly. That's ok, and not a big deal.
>
>It will also get rid of lambda, and it's not a great loss, since
>python's version is so limited that it's almost useless. Besides,
>given the syntactic sugar used to replace map, reduce and filter,
>there's no real need for lambda in the most usual cases.

It is my opinion that this is a natural consequence of infix notation,
deep operator precedence heirarchy, and consequently no macro system.

With Lisp, you have the good, solid, general constructs. And if you
need syntactic sugar (like WHEN, for example), you can just build
it up using macros.

So with Python 3000, you're going to end up with a language just as big
as CL, but without the most fundamental building blocks. Ah well, to
each his own.

My Road to Lisp was long and twisty. For a while it covered some Python
territory. But I started look into where exactly the interesting bits
of Python came from. And here I am. Though I've still got a lot to
learn.

James Graves

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