On Fri, 21 Sep 2007 19:52:41 -0400, Carl Banks wrote:
> First of all, let me say that I think "functions as first class data" is
> helpful, but not crucial, to programming in Python, and there are many
> people who simply don't need the lesson. Especially someone like an
> engineer (in the classical sense), who isn't building versatile software
> packages, won't need to resort to functional programming much.
Of course you don't *need* functional programming as in "there's no way
around it", but why are engineers such an exception!? I find the stuff in
`itertools` very handy when it comes to filter, manipulate, group and
aggregate data from large log files in ad hoc scripts. I'm not an
engineer but I guess there are similar tasks with log files or measurement
results.
> For straightforward tasks, like sorting lists with a custom ordering,
> functional progamming merely a convenience, and can be done without.
``for`` loops are just a convenience, you can do without. ;-)
Ciao,
Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
