[masklinn]

> you can use them as fully anonymous functions.

A lambda can only contain a single expression, by "full anonymous function" I'm guessing hexane360 means multiple statements. You can't put a for loop or a context manager in a lambda for instance.

[grondilu]

You can nest lambdas to get the equivalent of several expressions. I once wrote a Runge-Kutta example on Rosetta Code showing this:

http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Runge-Kutta_method#using_lambda

It does not look as bad as one might expect, though the nesting of parenthesis makes things messy.

[masklinn]

You can but you still can't get statements in there.

[ergl]

You can hack together multiple expressions chaining them with and http://sigusr2.net/one-line-echo-server-using-let-python.htm...

[zardeh]

That still doesn't get you statements.

You can't get context managers or exception handling (although you can raise exceptions) into lambdas, I've tried.

[masklinn]

Well you might be able to if you add a bunch of named function combinators wrapping these, but definitely not with only lambdas, unless you define your combinators using `ast`, which I think would let you define statements via expressions.

[AnkhMorporkian]

That's an awful lot of effort to go to to avoid naming a function.

[zardeh]

Well sure, you could do something like

    def apply_ctx(ctx, func, *func_args, **func_kwargs):
        with ctx as __ctx:
            func(*func_args, **func_kwargs, ctx=__ctx)

but you can't do that itself as a lambda. And I consider modifying the ast cheating :P