Oct. 22, 2003
3:07 p.m.
I probably missed it in this monster of a thread, but how do generator expressions do this? It seems that they'd only make reduce more efficient, but it would still be just as needed as before.
All we need is more standard accumulator functions like sum(). There are many useful accumulator functions that aren't easily expressed as a binary operator but are easily done with an explicit iterator argument, so I am hopeful that the need for reduce will disappear. 99% use cases for reduce were with operator.add, and that's replaced by sum() already. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)