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

Peter Schneider-Kamp nowonder@nowonder.de
Tue, 29 Aug 2000 00:41:57 +0000

Greg Wilson wrote:

I would vote -1 on [0...100:10] --- even range(0, 100, 10) reads better,

I don't like [0...100] either. It just looks bad. But I really do like [0..100] (maybe that's Pascal being my first serious language).

That said, I prefer almost any form of range literals over the current situation. range(0,100) has no meaning to me (maybe because English is not my mother tongue), but [0..100] looks like "from 0 to 100" (although one might expect len([1..100]) == 100).

but in my experience, students coming to Python from other languages seem to expect to be able to say "do this N times" very simply. Even:

for i in range(100): raises eyebrows. I know it's all syntactic sugar, but it comes up in the first hour of every course I've taught...

I fully agree on that one, although I think range(N) to iterate N times isn't as bad as range(len(SEQUENCE)) to iterate over the indices of a sequence.

not-voting---but-you-might-be-able-to-guess-ly y'rs Peter

Peter Schneider-Kamp ++47-7388-7331 Herman Krags veg 51-11 mailto:peter@schneider-kamp.de N-7050 Trondheim http://schneider-kamp.de