What is the 'pythonic' equivalent to the 'fold' function from functional programming?

Question

What is the most idiomatic way to achieve something like the following, in Haskell:

foldl (+) 0 [1,2,3,4,5]
--> 15

Or its equivalent in

Answer 1

Starting Python 3.8, and the introduction of assignment expressions (PEP 572) (:= operator), which gives the possibility to name the result of an expression, we can use a list comprehension to replicate what other languages call fold/foldleft/reduce operations:

Given a list, a reducing function and an accumulator:

items = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
f = lambda acc, x: acc * x
accumulator = 1

we can fold items with f in order to obtain the resulting accumulation:

[accumulator := f(accumulator, x) for x in items]
# accumulator = 120

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or in a condensed formed:

acc = 1; [acc := acc * x for x in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]]
# acc = 120

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Note that this is actually also a "scanleft" operation as the result of the list comprehension represents the state of the accumulation at each step:

acc = 1
scanned = [acc := acc * x for x in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]]
# scanned = [1, 2, 6, 24, 120]
# acc = 120