[mden]

Anyone have examples where fold leads to easier to read code than a for loop in Rust?

[kccqzy]

Readability is subjective. I personally find fold almost always more readable than a for loop when the accumulator variable has a simple type. This is because merely seeing fold can already telling me several things: it will iterate over the entire collection without early exits like "break" in a loop; the data dependency between each iteration is made clear into a single variable.

I find it slightly difficult to read when the accumulator variable actually has multiple parts, like a complicated tuple. It's worse when part of the accumulator is a bool indicating whether it's finished; that's just a poor emulation of "break" in a for loop.

[ironhaven]

I have used fold for converting strings to a bitset in advent of code

    let string = "ewfsan";
    let bitset = string.bytes().fold(0u32 |acc, ch| acc | 1 << (ch - b'a'));

This is a idiom that I have used many times so this being more consice than a for loop is a plus

Of course if you have never seen a syntax before it will make less sense that anything you have seen before

[bippihippi1]

afair I've mostly only used fold when doing maths not covered by the standard sum or product. Fold is similar to map reduce but it's just one expression.

[Mond_]

I find `foo.iter().map(|x| x.bar()).collect()` almost always easier to read and better at expressing intent than a for loop.

The other direction is more interesting to me: Those are the awkward cases where people sometimes overdo it with the functional iterator heavy style.