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A comment on Common Python Mistakes. Parent comment

Re:Common Python Mistakes by maxerickson on Thursday May 08, 2014 @11:41AM (#7715865)
Some of it seems to come from people cargo-culting their knowledge of anonymous and first class functions, so they end up believing that the only way to pass a function around is to construct it anonymously.
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Re:Common Python Mistakes by nine_k on Thursday May 08, 2014 @03:05PM (#7717019)
In the particular case of constructing several similar functions that do essentially the same thing, lambda is a rather natural choice.

Being more explicit and less hacky can well be combined with staying true to functional style:

    from functools import partial
    
    mul = lambda x, y: x*y  # could use int.__mul__, too
    multipliers = [partial(mul, n) for n in range(5)]
It does the closure-capturing of n for you.
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Re:Common Python Mistakes by maxerickson on Thursday May 08, 2014 @03:30PM (#7717160)
A function defined with def would work just the same there.

It would have a big ugly 'return' in it and be a few characters longer, but it would work the same, so I don't see what lambda brings to it.

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Re:Common Python Mistakes by nine_k on Thursday May 08, 2014 @04:34PM (#7717503)
Both def and lambda would fail identically in this context.
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