Re: "Accumulate" in Mathematica 6
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg82818] Re: "Accumulate" in Mathematica 6
- From: Thomas E Burton <tburton at brahea.com>
- Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 06:22:59 -0500 (EST)
Perhaps Wolfram will speak for themselves. My take is this: Accumulating a list of numbers seems to be about 3 times faster than the alternative using FoldList. This application is very common, perhaps justifying this new, apparently redundant specialized function. And as you suggest, for the other applications, FoldList [f,e1,g[e2,e3]] is equivalent to version 1's Accumulate[f,g [e1,e2,e3]]. So version 6 seems to offer a decent compromise. It also seems to me that one objective of version 6 is to broaden appeal by lessening idiosyncrasies. To reintroduce version 1's idiosyncratic take on "accumulate" would seem counterproductive. > Maybe I'm missing something here - but what was the rationale > behind re-implementing "Accumulate" in such a restricted version now?