What is the ‘pythonic’ equivalent to the ‘fold’ function from functional programming?

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The Pythonic way of summing an array is using sum. For other purposes, you can sometimes use some combination of reduce (from the functools module) and the operator module, e.g.:

def product(xs):
    return reduce(operator.mul, xs, 1)

Be aware that reduce is actually a foldl, in Haskell terms. There is no special syntax to perform folds, there’s no builtin foldr, and actually using reduce with non-associative operators is considered bad style.

Using higher-order functions is quite pythonic; it makes good use of Python’s principle that everything is an object, including functions and classes. You are right that lambdas are frowned upon by some Pythonistas, but mostly because they tend not to be very readable when they get complex.

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