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Chris Grazioli
31,225 PointsI have no idea what the add function/method does, anyone care to explain it
In Functional Python, none of the videos actually covered the add function/method. I would greatly appreciate someone taking a stab at explaining it.
Also the concept of Map() versus Reduce() isn't really shaking out for me either... they seem to do the same thing? Whats the difference and what would be the use case for either?
1 Answer
Steven Parker
231,248 Points
The challenge says add is a function that will "add two numbers together".
If you wrote it yourself, it would probably look like this:
def add(a, b):
return a + b
Since it is already available in the operator module, they just have you import it.
Then map takes a function which itself takes one argument, and applies it to each item in a list, and returns the resulting list. For example:
def add5(a):
return a + 5;
mylist = map(add5, [1, 2, 3, 4]) # mylist will be [6, 7, 8, 9]
On the other hand, reduce takes a function which itself takes two arguments, and applies that to an accumulator and each list item, and then returns the accumulator (a single value). For example:
total = reduce(add, [1, 2, 3, 4]) # total will be 10
Make sense now?