Question

I come to this point when I was making a simple calculator. I did a simple program to sum the list of numbers as follows, But the program for multiplication is a little bit long.

So can anybody have any idea how to make short program to multiple list of numbers in python. Here is my code what looks like.

def calculate(oper,*nm):
    return oper(nm)

add=lambda x:sum(x)

def mult(lst):
    tmp=1
    for i in lst:
        tmp*=i
    return tmp

calculate(add,2,34,2)

calculate(mult,8,5,7)

Answer 1

Really, you do not need to define calculate because Python already has a name for it: reduce.

def calculate(oper, *nm):
    return reduce(oper, nm)

In [6]: import operator

In [7]: calculate(operator.add, 2, 34, 2)
Out[7]: 38

In [8]: calculate(operator.mul, 8, 5, 7)
Out[9]: 280

Note: In Python3, reduce has been moved to the functools module. (Thanks to @ErikRoper for pointing this out.)