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Well, Scala and Haskell's comprehensions are monad comprehensions, mapping to operations such as map, filter and flatMap/bind. Python's for comprehensions only

Well, Scala and Haskell's comprehensions are monad comprehensions, mapping to operations such as map, filter and flatMap/bind. Python's for comprehensions only work on things that are iterable, which IMHO is a severe design limitation and makes them less useful than they should be. Think at Async I/O abstractions, like futures / observables / iteratees, which are not iterables. And yes, if Python makes it easier to work with higher-order functions and such combinators / operators become the norm, then we'll talk about 2 non-orthogonal and conflicting features. Python is the only language I know that added for comprehensions before proper support for anonymous functions. All the other languages I worked with (including Clojure, to be on topic) had anonymous functions before the syntactic sugar built on top. Clearly Python has a problem here.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> Python is the only language I know that added for comprehensions before proper support for anonymous functions. All the other languages I worked with (including Clojure, to be on topic) had anonymous functions before the syntactic sugar built on top. Clearly Python has a problem here. Wait, first you claimed that Python wouldn't need comprehensions if it had better anon function support, and now you've claimed that Python has a problem because it added for comprehensions before anon function support, even though languages with anon function support still find the need for for comprehensions. You seem to be convinced that Python is wrong, but not really committed to any consistency in the reason that Python is wrong.
- bad_user 12y ago
  The 2 statements are consistent. You can live without for comprehensions if you have good anonymous functions support. If Python adds better anonymous functions support, its for comprehensions will be conflicting and much less useful than in languages that had good anonymous functions support from the beginning. Either way, Python will never get multi-line anonymous functions support, since it's first of all considered to be un-pythonic. So we're having this discussion for nothing - I fell out of love with Python some time ago, if you still like it than good for you.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > You can live without for comprehensions if you have good anonymous functions support. You can live without either, as decades of C programmers have demonstrated. Both are beneficial, as theeir widespread popularity in newer language attests. Neither is a perfect substitute for the other, as the fact that they tend to be both present in many newer languages, rather than being exclusive. > its for comprehensions will be conflicting and much less useful than in languages that had good anonymous functions support from the beginning. I don't see the "conflict" asserted here. I've used Ruby fairly heavily -- which has, in the relevant sense, far better anonymous function support than Python (even though it has different quirks) -- and certainly as nice as Ruby blocks are, a clean comprehension syntax is pretty much the main thing I find myself wishing I had sometimes in Ruby that Python has. And, sure, Python's comprehensions may be less general than, e.g., Scala's, but switching them to be monadic rather than iterator based doesn't require better anonymous function support, it just requires changing which protocol they depend on.
deleted 12y ago
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dragonwriter 12y ago

> Python is the only language I know that added for comprehensions before proper support for anonymous functions. All the other languages I worked with (including Clojure, to be on topic) had anonymous functions before the syntactic sugar built on top. Clearly Python has a problem here. Wait, first you claimed that Python wouldn't need comprehensions if it had better anon function support, and now you've claimed that Python has a problem because it added for comprehensions before anon function support, even though languages with anon function support still find the need for for comprehensions. You seem to be convinced that Python is wrong, but not really committed to any consistency in the reason that Python is wrong.

bad_user 12y ago
The 2 statements are consistent. You can live without for comprehensions if you have good anonymous functions support. If Python adds better anonymous functions support, its for comprehensions will be conflicting and much less useful than in languages that had good anonymous functions support from the beginning. Either way, Python will never get multi-line anonymous functions support, since it's first of all considered to be un-pythonic. So we're having this discussion for nothing - I fell out of love with Python some time ago, if you still like it than good for you.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > You can live without for comprehensions if you have good anonymous functions support. You can live without either, as decades of C programmers have demonstrated. Both are beneficial, as theeir widespread popularity in newer language attests. Neither is a perfect substitute for the other, as the fact that they tend to be both present in many newer languages, rather than being exclusive. > its for comprehensions will be conflicting and much less useful than in languages that had good anonymous functions support from the beginning. I don't see the "conflict" asserted here. I've used Ruby fairly heavily -- which has, in the relevant sense, far better anonymous function support than Python (even though it has different quirks) -- and certainly as nice as Ruby blocks are, a clean comprehension syntax is pretty much the main thing I find myself wishing I had sometimes in Ruby that Python has. And, sure, Python's comprehensions may be less general than, e.g., Scala's, but switching them to be monadic rather than iterator based doesn't require better anonymous function support, it just requires changing which protocol they depend on.

deleted 12y ago

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