Re: reduce metaoperator on an empty list

[Damian Conway]

Edward Cherlin wrote:

You haven't convinced me, but rather than flog a dead horse,
I'll just suggest that we both reserve the right to say "I
told you so" when there are several years' worth of Perl 6
code out there, and we see how common our respective examples
are.
 
No need to wait. There is a ton of APL and J code to inspect. 
Having predefined identity elements for reductions on empty 
arrays is widely exploited. 

I would be more convinced by this body of experience if I felt that the wide 
exploitation of implicit identity elements actually helped improve the 
predictability and maintainability of programs written in those languages, 
neither of which is renowned for its accessibility to ordinary programmers. ;-)

Damian