[masklinn]

The latter can't really happen given Python is a statements- and indentations-based language. You'd need some really weird meta-magical syntax which really isn't going to happen in Python. Although you can cheat by fucking around with decorators e.g.

    def postfix(fn, *args):
        return lambda arg: fn(arg, *args)

    @postfix(map, range(5))
    def result(i):
        return i * i

    print result
    # [0, 1, 4, 9, 16]

(`postfix` is necessary because `map` takes its argument positionally so it's not possible to pass in the sequence with functools.partial)

[dragonwriter]

> The latter can't really happen given Python is a statements- and indentations-based language.

Yeah, though I suppose you could hack around that and get nearly-full functionality in lambdas if you built a library that either wrapped non-expression statements in functions or provided equivalent functions. There are obviously some statements that there aren't good solutions for in that direction.

OTOH, using named functions is in many cases more readable -- in the context of what is otherwise a normal Python codebase -- than the kind of lambdas that you can't easily write in Python. But I like the Coconut approach of but providing a more concise syntax for the kind of lambdas Python already supports.