Fold function in Octave

Question

Is there standard implementation of fold (reduce, aggregate etc) for one dimensional vector in Octave? If no, is there any way to express fold without using a loop statement?

Answer 1

The miscellaneous package provides the function reduce. For example,

octave:6> reduce(@(x,y)(x*y), [1:5])
ans =  120

If you look at the source code for reduce, you'll see that it is a fairly simple Octave function that is implemented with a for loop, so it won't be more efficient than implementing the reduction with a for loop of your own.