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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

> but for me, Lua is just far more elegant,

It's curious... Lua is my favorite language due to its elegance, but I would love it even more if it used significant indentation (using tabs, of course) instead of "end" blocks.

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OTOH, I would love Python even more if I could do:

    x = function(x) return x*x end

and not use those awful Python lambdas...

Not that it really matters though, bridges still get built.

Your example is already doable without lambdas:

    def f(x): return x * x

To clarify: the point I was trying to make was that the explicit 'end' in Lua allows for closures that are more nice (subjective) than Python lambdas. Something both JS and Lua got right, but with which Python ended up with a much more limited syntax.

The lambda syntax is not what makes it less nice - it's the fact that they are limited to a single expression. Being indentation-based has nothing to do with that restriction: Nim manages to use indents and to have multiline lambdas at the same time.

it looks a bit perverse to use the same name for the function and for its argument, but maybe it's just me

Lexical scope, I like it

    x = lambda x: x*x

It doesn't look that bad in comparison...

You can try moonscript. It compiles to Lua and uses significant indentation.

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