The Elegant Way to Compute the Sum of All Elements in a List

Python is a popular high-level programming language, and list comprehensions are an elegant way to calculate sums. In this tutorial, you will learn how to obtain the sum of all elements within a list. …

Updated November 24, 2023

Python is a popular high-level programming language, and list comprehensions are an elegant way to calculate sums. In this tutorial, you will learn how to obtain the sum of all elements within a list.

Python lists are one of its most powerful data types, and they can be used for a variety of tasks. One of them is to compute the sum of all elements in a list. Here’s a simple way to do that using Python:

list_elements = [10, 20, 30, 40, 50]
total_sum = sum(list_elements)
print(total_sum)

In the above code, sum() is a built-in function in Python which can be used to compute the sum of all elements in an iterable (like list). The result is then printed out.

This is quite straightforward and efficient. But if you want to use some more complex approach, here’s how you could get the sum using list comprehensions:

list_elements = [10, 20, 30, 40, 50]
total_sum = sum([i for i in list_elements])
print(total_sum)

In this case, the sum is calculated by first creating a new list that consists of each element from list_elements multiplied by itself (effectively doubling each number), and then calculating the sum of all elements in this new list. This code may seem more complex but it allows you to do more with your data before computing the sum, such as filtering out certain elements or transforming them into some other format.

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