The typical academic example is to sum a list. Are there real world examples of the use of fold that will shed light on its utility ?
fold is perhaps the most fundamental operation on sequences. Asking for its utility is like asking for the utility of a for loop in an imperative language.
Given a list (or array, or tree, or ..), a starting value, and a function, the fold operator reduces the list to a single result. It is also the natural catamorphism (destructor) for lists.
Any operations that take a list as input, and produce an output after inspecting the elements of the list can be encoded as folds. E.g.
sum = fold (+) 0
length = fold (λx n → 1 + n) 0
reverse = fold (λx xs → xs ++ [x]) []
map f = fold (λx ys → f x : ys) []
filter p = fold (λx xs → if p x then x : xs else xs) []
The fold operator is not specific to lists, but can be generalised in a uniform way to ‘regular’ datatypes.
So, as one of the most fundamental operations on a wide variety of data types, it certainly does have some use out there. Being able to recognize when an algorithm can be described as a fold is a useful skill that will lead to cleaner code.
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