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

[Alex Martelli]

On Sunday 20 April 2003 07:59 am, Raymond Hettinger wrote:
> > 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.

Yes, I agree it does -- both  in discussions (c.l.py, python-help -- dunno
'bout tutor, as I'm not following it) AND in practical use.


> > 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.

__builtin__ has 123 entries.  ls Lib/*.py | wc finds 183 toplevel modules
(without even mentioning those modules that are already grouped into
packages).  So, making new modules should be roughly as much of a
"fatness" problem as adding new builtins, at least, shouldn't it?  min and
max are already built-ins.  Computing average(x) as sum(x)/len(x) does
not seem too much of a problem.  product, moment and dotproduct
appear to be "nice to have" rather than real needs.

True, math deals only with float stuff.  But operator doesn't seem too
bad -- sure, it mostly exposes stuff that's already elsewhere in the
internals (operators AND others, such as countOf), but that could be
considered an implementation detail.


Alex