using Python reduce over a list of pairs

Posted by user248237 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by user248237
Published on 2012-10-21T16:42:22Z Indexed on 2012/10/21 17:00 UTC
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I'm trying to pair together a bunch of elements in a list to create a final object, in a way that's analogous to making a sum of objects. I'm trying to use a simple variation on reduce where you consider a list of pairs rather than a flat list to do this. I want to do something along the lines of:

nums = [1, 2, 3]
reduce(lambda x, y: x + y, nums)

except I'd like to add additional information to the sum that is specific to each element in the list of numbers nums. For example for each pair (a,b) in the list, run the sum as (a+b):

nums = [(1, 0), (2, 5), (3, 10)]
reduce(lambda x, y: (x[0]+x[1]) + (y[0]+y[1]), nums)

This does not work:

>>> reduce(lambda x, y: (x[0]+x[1]) + (y[0]+y[1]), nums)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <lambda>
TypeError: 'int' object is unsubscriptable

Why does it not work? I know I can encode nums as a flat list - that is not the point - I just want to be able to create a reduce operation that can iterate over a list of pairs, or over two lists of the same length simultaneously and pool information from both lists. thanks.

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