> Quite to the point, lambdas (anonymous closures) in Python are gimped. They are single-expression functions, which means no statements, even global/nonlocal qualifiers.

I remember once on rosettacode I wanted to write a Runge-Kutta function in Python with a lambda. I was stopped by the lack of variable assignment, until I remembered that they can be emulated by nesting function calls:

    def RK4(f):
	return lambda t, y, dt: (
		lambda dy1: (
		lambda dy2: (
		lambda dy3: (
		lambda dy4: (dy1 + 2*dy2 + 2*dy3 + dy4)/6
		)( dt * f( t + dt  , y + dy3   ) )
		)( dt * f( t + dt/2, y + dy2/2 ) )
		)( dt * f( t + dt/2, y + dy1/2 ) )
		)( dt * f( t       , y         ) )

https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Runge-Kutta_method#using_lambda