I don't think you understand what was claimed in the article. 'List comprehension' is the name of a specific syntactic construct. List comprehensions describe s

I don't think you understand what was claimed in the article. 'List comprehension' is the name of a specific syntactic construct. List comprehensions describe straightforward transformations of other lists in convenient notation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_comprehension http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_comprehension They're syntactic sugar for map and filter. Consider this python code: [x**2 for x in range(100) if x % 2 == 1] This is a list comprehension. It's equivalent (in 2.x) to the Python map(lambda x: x**2, filter(lambda x: x%2 == 1, range(100))) (or in Clojure, (map #(* % %) (filter #(= 1 (mod % 2)) (range 100))) (seems like cheating to use the odd? function)) ...so, equivalent to map and filter, just with better syntax. Caveat: in 3.x, python's map and filter return generators, so the equivalent comprehension would be a generator comprehension instead--just the same thing as above but wrapped in parens and not square brackets--which would also return a generator.