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[Python-ideas] allow `lambda' to be spelled λ

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Tue Jul 12 23:25:59 EDT 2016 
On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 12:04 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> Chris Angelico writes:
>
>  > A variant Python would be welcome to translate all the operators
>  > and keywords into single-character tokens, using Unicode symbols
>  > for NOT EQUAL TO and so on - including using U+03BB in place of
>  > 'lambda'.
>
> Probably it would not be "welcome", except in the usual sense that
> "Python is open source, you can do what you want".
>
> ... programmers communicating to other programmers. ...
>
> This is not to say that individuals who want a personalized[1]
> language are wrong, just that it would have a net negative impact on
> communication in teams.

A fair point. But Python has a strong mathematical side (look how big
the numpy/scipy/matplotlib communities are), and we've already seen
how strongly they prefer "a @ b" to "a.matmul(b)". If there's support
for a language variant that uses more and shorter symbols, that would
be where I'd expect to find it.

ChrisA
not a mathematician, although I play one on the internet sometimes
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