Comments on Version 2, Draft Pep for Deprecating Builtins

[David Eppstein]

In article <Bhgz8.58769$vm6.9975333 at ruti.visi.com>,
 grante at visi.com (Grant Edwards) wrote:

> > reduce doesn't return a list, so a list comprehension is not an
> > appropriate replacement.
> > 
> >  reduce(fn, seq, initial)
> > becomes:
> >  res = initial
> >  for v in seq: res = fn(res, v)
> 
> I find the "reduce" spelling simpler and easier to both read
> and write.

Not to mention that the two parameter reduce (without the "initial" 
argument) becomes a lot uglier...e.g. instead of

    reduce(fn, seq)

we need something like

    sseq = iter(seq)
    res = sseq.next()
    for v in sseq:
        res = fn(res, v)

-- 
David Eppstein       UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer Science
eppstein at ics.uci.edu http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/