title: Python alternative to reduce()
body: <p>There is a <a href="http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196" rel="noreferrer">semi-famous article written by Guido himself</a> hinting that <code>reduce()</code> should go the way of the dodo and leave the language.  It was even demoted from being a top-level function in Python 3 (<a href="http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/functools.html" rel="noreferrer">instead getting stuffed in the <code>functools</code> module</a>).</p>
  
  <p>With many other functional programming staples (map, etc) common clear alternatives are available.  For example, most of the time a <code>map()</code> is better written as a list comprehension.</p>
  
  <p>What I'd like to know is if there is a similar "more pythonic" alternative to the reduce function.  I have a bit of a functional programming background (ML in particular), so <code>reduce()</code> often springs to my mind when thinking of a solution, but if there's a better way to do them (short of unrolling a reduce call into a for loop) I'd like to know.</p>