All~
What does the reduce metaoperator do with an empty list?
my @a; [+] @a; # 0? exception? [*] @a; # 1? exception? [<] @a; # false? [||] @a; # false? [&&] @a; # true?
Also if it magically supplies some correct like the above, how does it know what that value is?
The usual definition of reduce in most languages that support it, is that reduce over the empty list produces the Identity value for the operation. So for the above ops the answers are: 0, 1, depends, false, true. For chained ops like '<' it depends on whether x<y<z return x or z on being true. if x then -inf else if z then +inf (don't ask if it returns y). Note that some ops (like '%') don't have an identity value and therefore [%] over the empty list is the equivalent to a divide by 0 and probably throws an exception or at least returns undef. Now this is a problem for user defined operations, so reduce of a user defined op over the empty list is either an exception, return undef or we need a trait that can be specified for an infix op that specifies what to return for reduce over the empty list. The compiler shouldn't bother to check if what you specified is really the Identity value for op, but I'd consider it a bug if it isn't.
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