array min
Builtin
Finding the minimum value in a list is easily done using the builtin min()
1 min([0,1,0,2,1,0,1,3,2,1,2,1]) # 0
Reduce
This is very similar to using reduce:
1 from functools import reduce
2 A = [0,1,0,2,1,0,1,3,2,1,2,1]
3 m = reduce(lambda a, x: min(a, x), A)
4 print(m)
Output:
1 0
Iterative
However, very often you'll want to do so iteratively, to use the min up until this v for example.
1 A = [3,2,1,1,2,1,0,1,3,2,1,2,1]
2 m = float('inf')
3 for v in A:
4 m = min(v, m)
5 print(m, end=' ')
Output:
1 3 2 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Notice the use of float('inf') . It can feel a little counterintuitive mixing types, but this is easier to remember than sys.maxsize.