What\'s the Most Pythonic Way to Perform Element-wise Vector Addition?

Element-wise Vector Addition: The Most Pythonic Approaches

Suppose you have two lists, list1 and list2, and you want to perform an element-by-element addition, resulting in a new list. What is the most Pythonic way to achieve this?

To avoid the potentially slow and verbose task of iterating through the lists, there are two highly efficient and Pythonic options:

1. Utilizing map with operator.add:

from operator import add
list(map(add, list1, list2))

This approach uses the map() function to apply the add operation from the operator module to each corresponding pair of elements in the lists. The result is a generator object that is converted to a list.

2. Employing a List Comprehension with zip:

[sum(x) for x in zip(list1, list2)]

Here, zip() combines the elements of the two lists into pairs, where each pair represents the corresponding elements for addition. The list comprehension then iterates over these pairs and uses sum() to accumulate their values, outputting the desired element-wise addition result as a list.

For large lists, consider using the faster itertools.izip instead of zip for performance optimization. However, both approaches offer excellent efficiency for most scenarios.

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