Range Operation pre-PEP

[Carlos Ribeiro]

At 12:23 09/05/01 +0200, Alex Martelli wrote:
>Getting beginners used to inclusive-upper-end idioms
>and then having them trip over exclusive-upper-end
>ones elsewhere later is NOT doing them any favour.

Ok, I'm in brainstorm mode. You're warned :-) Some weird ideas are just 
popping out of my mind:

1) Have both ':' and '..' as range operators. ':' excludes the last 
element, '..' includes it. This is a very simple rule-of-thumb. A beginner 
may be confused, but it's not something hard to learn.

2) Force the construct to be specified inside brackets or parenthesis, 
pretty much like list comprehensions.

3) If (2) is approved, then the step operator becomes a natural extension 
of the list comprehension syntax:

 >>> [1..5 step 2]
[1,3,5]
 >>> [1:5 step 2]
[1,3]

It's clear, readable and unambiguous.


Carlos Ribeiro