Peter Astrand wrote:
> Personally, I think Python has too many builtins already.
A suggestion was made on c.l.p a while back to have a specific module dedicated
to reductive operations. That is, just as itertools is oriented towards
manipulating iterables and creating iterators, this module would be oriented
towards consuming iterators in a reductive fashion.
product(), anytrue() and alltrue() were obvious candidates for inclusion ([1]).
The combination of explicit for loops and a standard toolkit of reductive
operations was designed to eliminate the need for reduce() ([2]).
Cheers,
Nick.
[1] While any()/all() read well in the context of an if statement, I think
anytrue()/alltrue() better convey the reductive nature of the operations, read
nearly as well in the if context, and read significantly better when isolated
from the if context (e.g. assigned to a variable). I also think the names are
less likely to collide with existing variable names.
[2] I'm firmly in Guido's camp on this one - whenever I encounter code that uses
reduce(), I have to rewrite it (either mentally or literally) to use a for loop
before I can understand it. Getting rid of the function would benefit me because
I would no longer have to waste time figuring out what such code was doing - it
would already be an explicit loop, or it would be using one of the standard
reductive operations.
--
Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at email.com | Brisbane, Australia
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