Indeed, the answer is "use obects". You can also get away with
default arguments sometimes (this is the recommended way to smuggle
selected bits of the calling scope into a lambda). I can't call it a
purposeful omission since I didn't even know what they were (having
always abhorred everything that even remotely smelled of Lisp :-) but
I don't think they would fit in well with the current language -- nor
that they are necessary. In a recent post of Dan Connolly on www-talk
he mentioned that closures were rather complicated beasts for
non-expert users (or something to that effect).
--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <mailto:Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl>
<http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Guido.van.Rossum.html>