Grouping code by indentation - feature or ******?

[Javier Bezos]

"Myles Strous" <myles at .com> escribió en el mensaje
news:1112162883.943233.37980 at o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
>>> satisfy some handy properties, the first of which being:
>>>   l[:n] + l[n:] = l
>>
>> I don't think l[:5] + l[5:] = l is a handy property
>> and to me is clearly counterintuitive. Further,
>
> It can be quite useful for inserting something into a list (or string),
> after finding the position where you wish to insert it.
> improvedList = l[:n] + [new stuff] + l[n:]

As I answered in another post this is not more
useful than writing l[:n-1]. Of course, I'm aware
of the case where n=0, but this would require only
a bit of extra code (and, after all, I'm just saying
that half-open ranges are not a panacea and that I
don't like their side effects).

> I vaguely remember hearing at one stage that the
> sequence[position:position+length] notation is also potentially useful
> for indexing into large strings or buffers.

Right, to some extent it's useful, but at the cost
of introducing tricky syntaxes for very specific
cases, like this one, and unexpected off-by-one
errors in other cases, which is my point. For
example, recently I had to get a value from a
list preceded by the two previous values:
lst[n-2:n+1] and not the more logical (at last
to my eyes) lst[n-2:n].

Instead of giving further examples I would like
to cite three cases:

1) You have a starting point (s) and a
   length (t): lst[s:s+t].
2) You have an ending point (e) and a
   length: lst[e-t+1:e+1].
3) You have a starting point and an ending
   point: lst[s:e+1].

What's odd is that Python applies the syntax of
case 3 to the logic of case 1. While something
like lst[s:s+t-1] for the first case could be
explained in simple mathematical terms (in other
words, it's an integral part of the algorithms),
I cannot find a way to explain the e+1 in cases
2 and 3 (and the inconsistency with e-t+1 in case
2 vs. s+t in case 1) except the Python syntax.

Javier
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Javier Bezos             | Mem. A multilingual system for LaTeX
jbezos at wanadoo dot es | http://mem-latex.sourceforge.net
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