built-in – Page 5 – Tarik Billa

What’s the function like sum() but for multiplication? product()?

October 7, 2022 by Tarik

Actually, Guido vetoed the idea: http://bugs.python.org/issue1093 But, as noted in that issue, you can make one pretty easily: from functools import reduce # Valid in Python 2.6+, required in Python 3 import operator reduce(operator.mul, (3, 4, 5), 1)

What is the purpose of the : (colon) GNU Bash builtin?

September 19, 2022 by Tarik

Historically, Bourne shells didn’t have true and false as built-in commands. true was instead simply aliased to :, and false to something like let 0. : is slightly better than true for portability to ancient Bourne-derived shells. As a simple example, consider having neither the ! pipeline operator nor the || list operator (as was … Read more