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

[Javier Bezos]

"Jacob Lee" <jelee2 at .edu> escribió en el mensaje

>> things which compesate that (another annoying point
>> of Python are slices -- mine are always off by 1).

>About slices:

Thank you, but I knew the motivations for this
odd behaviour, which can be found as well in, for
example, MetaFont. However, I disagree.

> 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,
I don't understand why l[a:b] has a behaviour which
does't depend on its own logic but on that of certain
constructs containing slices but which aren't the
slices themselves. If you have to add or substract
1 in an expression containing slices (or contained
in a slice), this belongs to the logic of the
expression, not to the slices syntax.

MetaFont explains this by saying that the index
doesn't refer to a character but to a position
between characters, which when traslated to Python
would mean:

   s   t   r   i   n   g
 ^   ^   ^   ^   ^   ^   ^
 0   1   2   3   4   5   6

so that [1:2] is "t".

Javier
___________________________________________________________
Javier Bezos                | TeX y tipografía
jbezos at wanadoo dot es    | http://perso.wanadoo.es/jbezos
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CervanTeX (Spanish TUG)     | http://www.cervantex.org