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[Python-Dev] Re: product()

David Eppstein eppstein at ics.uci.edu
Wed Oct 22 23:59:46 EDT 2003 
In article <002401c39907$0176f5a0$e841fea9 at oemcomputer>,
 "Raymond Hettinger" <raymond.hettinger at verizon.net> wrote:

> In the course of writing up Pep 289, it became clear that
> the future has a number of accumulator functions in store.
> Each of these is useful with iterators of all stripes and
> each helps eliminate a reason for using reduce().

Maybe it would be useful to get some feeling for how much other 
functions get used in reduce?

I took a look through some of my own code, and found:

- three loops with |= and &= that could have been done as a reduction on 
a generator expression (but for now will stay loops)

- one call reduce(f,...) where f is not known until run time

- no products.

My guess is that, after sum, the functions used in reduce get a lot more 
diverse, and that trying to replace all of them with builtins is not 
feasible.

-- 
David Eppstein                      http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Univ. of California, Irvine, School of Information & Computer Science
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