@Jeff: Cool trick! I honestly don’t use closures a lot but when it comes down to them they’re simply powerful. The whole decoration thingy is built upon closures. I think, now that you mentioned them, the basics of Python are one of its most powerful trump cards. The builtin-types, the fact that all-is-an-object and so on simply speed up our productivity but there are cases in which Python style simply excels (That’s not a comparison with other languages, don’t want to start a useless flame war)

name = property(LDAPMapper.getAttribute(”cn”, str))

The LDAPMapper.getAttribute method was then a closure of sorts:

def getAttribute(attr, dataType):
   def inner_get(self):
      return ldapObject.ldap_search(..attr..)
   return inner_get

That type of thing to me really exposes the beauty of a language like Python. Closure, first-class functions, properties, all in one system. The best part of the whole equation? I can easily subclass LDAPMapper as an account object or something of the sort and retrieve an LDAP name simply by accessing the ‘name’ parameter.

from future import braces

date_last_updated = max([story.date_published for story in stories])

date_last_updated is then used to populate the updated field of a Atom feed.

Now that I think about it, this could be improved to use a generation expression when used with a recent version of Python.