Raymond Hettinger added the comment:
I think the existing code conveys the author's message better than the proposed
revision. The example isn't about efficiency; rather, it is about comparing
several alternative formulations with this one being the weakest of the lost.
For emphasizing that
New submission from Anran Yang:
At the end of the Functional Programming HOWTO document
(https://docs.python.org/3.7/howto/functional.html) the usage of
reduce/lambda/for loops are compared and discussed. However, the example for
reduce seems sub-optimal and thus the discussion is not that eff
