How sum() should really be done
Douglas Alan
nessus at mit.edu
Thu Nov 13 13:07:12 EST 2003
Douglas Alan <nessus at mit.edu> writes:
> Knowing about reduce() doesn't come from a LISP background, since it
> is uncommon to use reduce() in LISP. There are few binary operators
> in LISP, so instead of doing reduce(+, seq), in LISP, you would
> typically do apply(+, seq).
Ah, that reminds me -- both sum() and reduce() can be removed from
Python by extending operator.add so that it will take any number of
arguments. Then you can add up a sequence of numbers by doing
add(*seq). The same thing goes for every other binary operator where
it makes sense to operate on more than two arguments at a time.
Now that's clean, simple, and powerful.
|>oug
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