Probably. I think the former is more readable and, at the use site, more concise. Regardless, I don't think the hypothetical is super useful, because its unsta

Probably. I think the former is more readable and, at the use site, more concise. Regardless, I don't think the hypothetical is super useful, because its unstated major premise is, "But what if we, for the sake of argument, ignore all the other good reasons why Python doesn't have them?" My favorite programming language is functional, and has significant whitespace and multiline anonymous functions. While it is my favorite, I do have to concede that the Python language maintainers' worries about the syntactic implications of multiline lambdas in a whitespace language are accurate. (I could quote the zen of python some more here, too. Lines 5 and 6.)