Lambda functions (aka anonymous functions) were long a mystery to me. I think it’s just because I didn’t relate anonymous functions to them. Now they make sense, though I can’t claim to understand some of the more convoluted ones I have seen. (Convoluted to me, though not to the authors I am sure.)
List comprehensions took a while also. I was able to guess the meaning but I wasn’t able to actually write one until recently. It kept throwing syntax errors. After upgrading some components suddenly list comprehensions started to work. I thought I was already at least at python 2.5 previously so I am not sure what happened. But now it works. The other part was finding out the name list comprehensions. That actually took a while. It turns out it’s in the docs but I hadn’t gone through that before. It was a bit of luck with Google that I hit on the term “list comprehensions” at which point it all became clearer.
One good summary though is from the creator of web2py:
new appliance and web site! – web2py Web Framework | Google Groups
Example 1:
z=lambda x,y: x+y
you should read “lambda” and “:” as “a function that takes the variables” and “and returns”. Hence the above example reads:
z = a function that takes the variables x,y and returns x+y
and z(3,4) returns 7. There is really nothing more to it.
Example 2:
q=[process(x) for x in somelist if condition(x)]
is a shorthand notation for
q=[]
for x in somelist:
if condition(x):
q.append(process(x))
That comparison is quite helpful.
