[Python-Dev] Fwd: summing a bunch of numbers (or "whatevers")

[Raymond Hettinger]

> Now, I think the obvious approach would be to have a function sum,
> callable with any non-empty homogeneous sequence (sequence of
> items such that + can apply between them), returning the sequence's
> summation -- now THAT might help for simplicity, clarity AND power.

+1  -- this comes-up all the time.

> I'm not
> quite sure where it should go -- a builtin seems most natural (to keep
> company with min and max, for example), but maybe that would be
> too ambitious, and it should be in math or operator instead...

__builtin__ is already too fat.  math is for floats.  operator is mostly
for operators.  Perhaps make a separate module for vector-to-scalar 
operations like min, max, product, average, moment, and dotproduct.


Raymond Hettinger