I don't mind C++'s lambdas, but in some other languages they use "arrows", like

   square = (x) -> x * x

C++ won't want to give up the different kinds of capturing, though, so it's hard to see anything much better than what's available now.

In imaginary, never-to-be-implemented language daydreams I toy with the idea of using curly braces and implicit positional arguments to have lambdas look like

    square = { _1 * _1 }

and

    factorial = { (_1 < 2) ? 1 : _0(_1 - 1) }

and with explicit captures and arguments,

    partial_sort = [&lt_vec, &ge_vec, pivot](item){
        if (item < pivot) lt_vec.add(item)
        else ge_vec.add(item)
    }

I suspect, though, those ideas are just horrible shortcuts to a Perl-like hell :-)