Functional Programming - Reduce - Reduction Operation (fold)

A (reduction|reduce) operation (also called a fold) is a functional programming function.

Reduction operations are terminal operations.

They takes a sequence of input elements and returns:

• a single summary result
• a collection
• or a map

Example:

• finding the sum or maximum of a set of numbers,
• finding the average of values
• grouping elements into categories
• accumulating elements into a list (collections) - group by, partitioningBy
• summarizing elements according to various criteria
• etc..

A reduction operates on the stream as a whole rather than on individual elements. See Data Processing - Batch

A properly constructed reduce operation is inherently parallelizable. See Parallel Programming - (Function|Operation)

• Reduction operations