lambda:
reduce
Lambda functions are just functions but typically very simple ones. It's the fact that makes them really easy to declare that makes them extremely expressive as well and in this series of videos we'd like to demonstrate not just how they work but also why they're nice to reason about.
Notes
The functools
library contains many items that allow you
to make the most out of lambda functions. A common example
is the reduce
function. We'll show a demonstration below.
from functools import reduce
numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
# sum via reduce
reduce(lambda x, y: x + y, numbers)
# prod via reduce
reduce(lambda x, y: x * y, numbers)
Note that reduce
tells us what we are doing while the
lambda
function tells us how we are doing it.
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