Python's simplicity philosophy

[David Eppstein]

In article <9s8tb.22141$9_.810000 at news1.tin.it>,
 Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> wrote:

> > How's that?  I've never used a programming language that has sum() in
> > it.  (Or at least not that I was aware of.)  In fact, the *Python* I
> > use doesn't even have sum() in it!  I've used a number of languages
> 
> Never used a modern Fortran?  Or never bothered to _learn_ it properly
> "because it's a language for peasants"?-)

For that matter, Haskell, the third thing I get from googling 
"functional programming language", has had sum since it was first 
created (version 1.0 report 1990), despite its being easily replaceable 
with reduce (or I guess in Haskell terms foldl).

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