> you can use them as fully anonymous functions.

A lambda can only contain a single expression, by "full anonymous function" I'm guessing hexane360 means multiple statements. You can't put a for loop or a context manager in a lambda for instance.

You can nest lambdas to get the equivalent of several expressions. I once wrote a Runge-Kutta example on Rosetta Code showing this:

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

It does not look as bad as one might expect, though the nesting of parenthesis makes things messy.

You can but you still can't get statements in there.

You can hack together multiple expressions chaining them with and http://sigusr2.net/one-line-echo-server-using-let-python.htm...

That still doesn't get you statements.

You can't get context managers or exception handling (although you can raise exceptions) into lambdas, I've tried.

Well you might be able to if you add a bunch of named function combinators wrapping these, but definitely not with only lambdas, unless you define your combinators using `ast`, which I think would let you define statements via expressions.

That's an awful lot of effort to go to to avoid naming a function.

Well sure, you could do something like

    def apply_ctx(ctx, func, *func_args, **func_kwargs):
        with ctx as __ctx:
            func(*func_args, **func_kwargs, ctx=__ctx)

but you can't do that itself as a lambda. And I consider modifying the ast cheating :P

> but you can't do that itself as a lambda. And I consider modifying the ast cheating :P

No disagreement, really depends whether you're a "rules" or "spirit" kind of person though.