Pauli Virtanen <pav@iki.fi> writes:
Returning a *right* identity for an operation that is otherwise a *left* fold is very odd, no matter how you slice it. That is what looks like special casing...
I think I see your point now.
I know this is unlikely to happen, since it would break things for a mostly-cosmetic (and that probably only in my eyes) improvement, but if reduce were defined as a *right* fold, then it would make sense for subtract (and divide) to use the right identity. A right fold is also perhaps more interesting, since it can be used to do alternating series, while the regular left-fold of subtract is pretty pointless. It also seems more natural that subtract.reduce([]) returns 0, because then we can partition the sequence however we want and preserve np.subtract.reduce(np.append(x[:i], np.subtract.reduce(x[i:]))) == np.subtract.reduce(x) for any i. But that's really just idle musing. This is, by the way, how J (the APL-derived array language) does it, but there it's very natural to do right folds since all operations are right-associative. Cheers, Johann