The syntax changes happened very much against Guido's will - he actively tried to remove lambda (and I believe map as well) for quite a while. Anyone can write

The syntax changes happened very much against Guido's will - he actively tried to remove lambda (and I believe map as well) for quite a while. Anyone can write whatever Python libraries they want, but I doubt anything of the sort would be added to the standard library, and certainly nothing that would require an FP-aware interpreter to optimize in a useful way.