Python's simplicity philosophy

[Andrew Dalke]

Douglas Alan:
> In Computer Science, however, "reduce" typically only has one meaning
> when provided as a function in a language, and programmers might as
> well learn that sooner than later.

There's also a __reduce__ and __reduce_ex__ in the pickle
protocol.  See  http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0307.html .
It's by far the most mentioned 'reduce' in the Python standard
library.  Does it have anything to do with the 'reduce' function?
Not that I can tell.  But I can't find an explaination for that
choice of a name.

>    FAQ
>    ---
>    Q. Should I ever pass a function with side effects into reduce() or
>       map()?
>
>    A. No.
>
>    (Unless the side-effect is just printing out debugging information,
>     or saving away statistics, or something like that.)

Or raising an exception on error.  And a true functional programmer
would say:

  Q: Should I ever pass a function with side effects?
  A: No.

 ;)
                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com