What is the purpose of the accumulator here?

[Montin]

This is one of the solutions to the Find the Longest Word in a String problem. I don’t understand why we use ‘longest’ in return statement since it seems to be doing nothing, I tried using only word.length and it still worked. Furthermore, why do we need Math.max since returning word.length alone will return the largest number anyway, I’m not sure how that works but it works. Can someone please clarify this?

function findLongestWordLength(s) {
  return s.split(' ')
    .reduce(function(longest, word) {
      return Math.max(longest, word.length)
    }, 0);
}```

[okibe007]

@Montin

return Math.max(longest, word.length)

what this does is to compare each element in the array .

@Montin

why do we need Math.max

Math.max Here serves the function of returning the greater of the values being compared.

@Montin

why do we need Math.max since returning word.length alone will return the largest number anyway

This should not work or at least it didn’t work at my end
insum: The genral structure for finding the largest element in an array using reduce is

arrayName.reduce(
function(a, b) {
return Math.max(a, b);
}
)

Heres a link to useful resource on Math.max()
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Math/max