[rustyminnow]

Like others have said:

- Can only have one line

- Can only use expressions, not statements. E.g. `print`s, loops, conditionals are out.

- Overall just kinda clunky

Here's an SO post about lambdas where the answer is "Use def instead." https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14843777/how-to-write-py...

[seertaak]

Exactly. Kind of an own-goal too, from none other than ex-BDFL. While not totally obvious, it's not impossible to widen the syntax to allow multi-line lambdas, you just need to ditch the stack-based lexer-integrated whitespace sensitivity behaviour.

[diarrhea]

This works for conditionals:

    In [4]: f = lambda x: "Yes" if x else "No"

    In [5]: f(True)
    Out[5]: 'Yes'

    In [6]: f(False)
    Out[6]: 'No'

It's Python's version of ternary operators, so not sure if that counts as a "true" conditional; but it is one.

Loops don't work, but list comprehensions do, and they are definitely the way to go here. Multi-line loops deserve a `def`.

[dragonwriter]

> Can only use expressions, not statements. E.g. `print`s, loops, conditionals are out.

print is a function (and thus can be used in expressions)

python has conditional expressions (<true-val> if <cond> else <false-val>)

loops are a limitation, though comprehensions, map(), functools.reduce(), and the itertools module can allow lots of looping functionality in an expression.

[heavyset_go]

print() is a function now and you can use it with lambdas.

[pmiller2]

Even in Python 2, you can do something like this:

    println = lambda s: sys.stdout.write(s + '\n')

Not that it really makes things much better, but, at least it shows you can do it.

[bobbylarrybobby]

The lambda calculus is Turing complete, so in theory, Python’s lambdas should suffice...

[jolux]

Turing completeness is completely unrelated to whether or not anonymous functions are easy to use in Python.

[zelphirkalt]

Which of course says nothing about usability and readability.

[rustyminnow]

I mean... You're right. They suffice. They're just less friendly (i.e. useful) than lambdas in other languages.