Is there any reason that would be a bad idea?

It would make join() more confusing.

Is it an appealing idea?

Not to me. You're taking a very simple, concrete, useful concept, and confounding it with a very abstract, complicated, and silly one. I can describe the purpose of a join in a single sentence: it joins together a list of stuff into a single string, using a given character as a separator.

I can't do that with reduce(), because what reduce is useful for varies wildly depending upon the helper function I give it. All I really know is that it produces some sort of summary statistic as a scalar from a list; which isn't that descriptive or helpful.

I don't like it. Taking something very simple and making it terribly complex is not the way perl should go, IMHO. Perl is hard enough to understand; there's too much overloading of concepts as it is. Making it worse is just, well, worse. ;-) --
Ytrew

In reply to Re: RFC: Should join subsume reduce? by Anonymous Monk
in thread RFC: Should join subsume reduce? by Roy Johnson

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