On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 10:54 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:

On Jul 12, 2013, at 04:01 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

>I'd personally be in favour of the notion of also allowing strings as the
>first argument, so you could instead write:
>
> data = fold("+=", [], iterables)

You had me until here...

>(Independent of this idea, it would actually be nice if the operator module
>had a dictionary mapping from op symbols to names, like
>operator.by_symbol["+="] giving operator.iadd)

...but this is a neat idea.

+1 from me as well. The table already exists in the docs (http://docs.python.org/3.4/library/operator.html#module-operator), it just needs to be codified. Maybe operator.map['+='] or operator.from_syntax['+=']. Go really nuts and support ['.attribute'] or ['[42]'] to auto-generate attrgetter or itemgetter instances, but that's probably just asking for support problems.