Q's: pythonD and range(1,12)

[Tim Leslie]

On 3/14/06, John Savage <rookswood at suburbian.com.au> wrote:
>
> I've very new to python, and am currently toying with pythonD. Could
> someone please explain the rationale behind python designers' thinking
> in deciding the function "range(1,12)" should return the sequence 1 to
> 11 rather than the more intuitively-useful 1 to 12??


The range() function maps closely to a very common idiom in c-like
languages.

for (i = a; i < b; i++) { do_stuff(i); }

in a C-like language is the same as

for i in range(a, b): do_stuff(i)

in python. Another way to think about it is to notice that if you do
range(10), you get exactly 10 items in your list (starting at 0), so going
from 0 to n-1 is the correct way to go. Having the "start from zero" case
work intuitively is the starting point and being able to specify a different
starting value to zero simply generalises on this.

Are you sure you need your range to start at 1? It's a common newbie error
to start counting from 1 instead of zero in some places, but I won't accuse
you of such an error without seeing more context :-)

HTH

Tim




After downloading the substantial distribution .zip file, I'm intrigued
> to find it includes 3 files of identical size and creation date, differing
> apparently only in name (python, python2.4 and python24.exe) and each of
> exactly 2,597,888 bytes. What possible purpose could be served by such
> triplication that couldn't more efficiently be done by other means?
>
> Naive but curious minds wish to know!
> --
> John Savage                   (my news address is not valid for email)
>
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
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