Most of us seem to agree that having list comprehensions available as a replacement for map() and filter() is a good thing. But what about reduce()? Are there equally strong reasons for wanting an alternative to that, too? If not, why not?
If anything, the desire there is *more* pressing. Except for operator.add, expressions involving reduce() are notoriously hard to understand (except to experienced APL or Scheme hackers :-). Things like sum, max, average etc. are expressed very elegantly with iterator comprehensions. I think the question is more one of frequency of use. List comps have nothing over e.g. result = [] for x in S: result.append(x**2) except compactness of exprssion. How frequent is result = 0.0 for x in S: result += x**2 ??? (I've already said my -1 about your 'sum of ...' proposal.) --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)