[Python-ideas] Enhancing range object string displays

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 1:10 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 05:09:25PM -0800, danish bluecheese wrote:
> > I think it is kind of useless effort. If somebody using range() then
> > probably knows about it.
>
> For experienced users, sure, but this is an enhancement to help
> beginners who may be confused by the half-open end points.
>
> Even non-beginners may find it nice to be able to easily see the end
> points when the step size is not 1.
>
> If range objects had this, I'd use it in the REPL to check the end
> points. Sure, I could convert to a list and take a slice, but giving the
> object a nicer print output makes less work for the user.
>

I'm a fairly experienced Python programmer, and I still just fire up a
REPL to confirm certain uses of range() with steps.

What would it be like if the string form looked like this:

>>> range(1, 30, 3)
range([1, 4, 7, ..., 25, 28])

In theory, this could actually be made legal, and could be a cool
feature for an enhanced REPL to support. (All you have to do is define
'range' as a function that checks if it's been given a list, and if
not, passes it on unchanged.)

Whether this form or the original, I think this would be an improvement.

ChrisA