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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, Python would really benefit from multi-line anonymous functions.

There was a limitation in Python where spacing and indentation gets ignored between parentheses, which makes it impossible to pass a multi-line lambda as an argument to a method or function. However, given the new parser, that limitation might be able to be mitigated.

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I would argue that multi-line anonymous functions are unpythonic. Exhibit A is this line from PEP 20:

  Readability counts.

I'm currently about a month into learning a legacy codebase that was written in a functional language. If I could single out one thoroughly egregious practice that has made this code far, far more difficult to read and understand than it should have been, it's multi-line anonymous functions. In general, if a function is doing something complicated enough to need multiple lines of code, it's doing something complicated enough to merit an explicit name.

> if a function is doing something complicated enough to need multiple lines of code, it's doing something complicated enough to merit an explicit name.

  def foo_and_bar(x):
    foo(x)
    bar(x)

whew! good thing i named that

IME this limitation just leads to throwaway names like

  process(x)
  go(x)
  do_foo(x) # in foo(x)
  cb/callback/fn

because a lot of things just don't have sensible names! just like how it'd suck to have to come up with a name for every loop body

(although there was some book advocating for "replace every loop body with a named function" so some people enjoy that i guess...)

I see you chopping the first two words off that quote. ;)

In this specific case, that single instance of a single pattern is such a throw-away that it doesn't deserve a name, but the pattern itself is easy enough to name. So I'd skip the single-purpose function and create a combinator.

  def do_each(*args):
    def helper(x):
      for fn in args:
        fn(x)
    return helper

and then, when I need to do both foo and bar, I don't even need a lambda.

  map(do_each(foo, bar), some_sequence)

That's a fairly specific case, though. Moving back to the general, I would say that a function that does more than one thing, but can't easily be named, is a code smell.

Of course, every general rule has its exceptions. But I'm not so keen on the idea of optimizing one's coding style for the exceptional cases. Going back to PEP 20, "Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules."

(I realize mapping a function that returns nothing is terrible, but I'm feeling too lazy to think of a better example.)

i like a nice combinator as much as the next person! but consider this: if python already had multiline lambdas, would you be arguing for using a narrow-purpose combinator instead of `lambda x: foo(x); bar(x)`?

[this kind of reminds me of Go's generics mess, where workarounds for lack of generics are "just how you write Go and that's the language's philosophy"... until generics land and suddenly they won't be]

Probably. I think the former is more readable and, at the use site, more concise.

Regardless, I don't think the hypothetical is super useful, because its unstated major premise is, "But what if we, for the sake of argument, ignore all the other good reasons why Python doesn't have them?"

My favorite programming language is functional, and has significant whitespace and multiline anonymous functions. While it is my favorite, I do have to concede that the Python language maintainers' worries about the syntactic implications of multiline lambdas in a whitespace language are accurate.

(I could quote the zen of python some more here, too. Lines 5 and 6.)

Assignment expressions were "unpythonic" based on PEP 20 until they weren't. Modern languages have multi-line anonymous functions, and developer expectations have changed in the 17 years since PEP 20 was published.

the thing with python is that it's "indentation-based" -- it's difficult to see "where does this anonymous function return or end?"

maybe it's time to allow optional brackets for marking where a function starts and ends? eg. a { ... } (or anything else -- even {| ... |} will do)

But you can define functions inside of functions (recursively).

  def function1():
      print ("hello outer")
      def function2():
          print ("hello inner")
      function2()

  function1()

Output:

  hello outer
  hello inner

But you can’t do that (or try/except) in an expression such as a list comprehension or similar.

Yes, because gross.

Nor, IMO, should you want to.

Why not? Many other languages have closures and even Python has lambdas. Multi-line closures work well for these languages including in map/reduce/etc or comprehensions where applicable. Seems like your preference is overfit to Python’s limitations.

Because you can do it in a function. It's not a limitation when you can do it. Having to define a function that's easier to read, and testable as an independent unit, is not a problem.

I don’t think this limitation is likely to change - the only ways to allow whitespace-sensitive statements inside an argument list are all really ugly.

If you really want though, you can write a web server in a single python lambda:

    (lambda flask:
        (lambda app:
            (app,
            app.route('/')(
                lambda: 'Hello World!'
            )
            )[0]
        )(flask.Flask('__name__')).run()
    )(__import__('flask'))

See https://gist.github.com/e000/1023982 for more horrible examples

I hate it, but it is clever.

You can do multiple lines, just not multiple statements:

    >>> f = lambda x: x * \
    ...  20
    >>>
    >>> f
    <function <lambda> at 0x7f8b69f2c6a8>
    >>> f(2)
    40

In fact, no statements at all - just a single expression.

well, you could pack a lot of other expressions into that expression, especially with 3.8/3.9, e.g.

x,y = 1,2

q = list(map(lambda t: (tx := t*x, ty := t*y, tx+ty)[-1], [1, 2, 3]))

Walrus operator: not even once.

walrus, actually, being an expression, it's a perfect fit for lambdas

Agreed. I suspect that most uses of python decorators become moot with proper multi-line anonymous functions. I assume some would argue that decorators create more readable code but they seemed like a syntax hack to me.

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