[Python-Dev] Lukewarm about range literals (original) (raw)

Skip Montanaro skip@mojam.com (Skip Montanaro)
Mon, 28 Aug 2000 16:46:19 -0500 (CDT) 

Guido> I notice that:

Guido>   for i in [:100]: print i

Guido> looks a bit too much like line noise.  I remember that Randy
Guido> Pausch once mentioned that a typical newbie will read this as:

Guido>   for i in 100 print i

Just tossing out a couple ideas here. I don't see either mentioned in the current version of the PEP.

1. Would it help readability if there were no optional elements in range
   literals?  That way you'd have to write

for i in [0:100]: print i

2. Would it be more visually obvious to use ellipsis notation to
   separate the start and end inidices?

    >>> for i in [0...100]: print i
0
1
...
99

>>> for i in [0...100:2]: print i
0
2
...
98

I don't know if either are possible syntactically.

Skip