Python's simplicity philosophy

[Dave Benjamin]

In article <lcekvjaenb.fsf at gaffa.mit.edu>, Douglas Alan wrote:
> Lots of languages don't provide reduce() and lots of languages do. Few
> provide sum().  Higher-order functions such as reduce() are
> problematic in statically typed langauges such as C, C++, or Java,
> which may go a long way towards explaining why none of them include
> it.  Neither C, C++, or Java provide sum() either, though PHP provides
> array_sum().  But PHP has a huge number of built-in functions, and I
> don't think that Python wishes to go in that direction.

Not that this contributes much to either side of this argument, but I just
want to mention that PHP *does* have a reduce function:

http://www.php.net/array_reduce

However, this requires pass-by-name and PHP has no support for closures, so
its usefulness is somewhat limited. PHP also has array_map() and
array_filter(), which do what you might expect...

Ducking out now,
Dave =)

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