What are practical uses for STL's 'partial_sum'?

Question

What/where are the practical uses of the partial_sum algorithm in STL?

What are some other interesting/non-trivial examples or use-cases?

Answer 1

Partial sums are often useful in parallel algorithms. Consider the code

for (int i=0; N>i; ++i) {
  sum += x[i];
  do_something(sum);
}

If you want to parallelise this code, you need to know the partial sums. I am using GNUs parallel version of partial_sum for something very similar.