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Comment by east2west | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if anyone knows why subtlety exists in Python. Is it because reference semantics and HOF are fundamentally incompatible, or could it have been avoided somehow but still retaining reference semantics. The most common complain about lambda in Python is that it is restricted to expressions, which is a conscious design decision that could have gone the opposite direction.

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The subtlety sixbrx mentions used to be present in C#, but it has been mostly fixed by moving the declaration of the foreach loop variable inside of the loop [1]. Like Python, C# has reference semantics. I'm surprised that Guido van Rossum didn't make a similar change when he broke backwards compatibility in Python 3.

[1]http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2009/11/12/closi...

Lexical scopes capturing variables is more powerful than capturing values.

If you want to capture values, that's easy too, with:

  lambda x, i=i: ...

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