[Python-Dev] python3k change to slicing (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Apr 19 19:40:41 CEST 2007

[+python-3000; followups please remove python-dev]

-1

While this may be theoretically preferable, I believe that in practice changing this would be a major pain for very little gain. I don't recall ever finding a bug related to this feature, and I believe it's occasionally useful.

Here's something that would be much more cumbersome with your proposed change: suppose I have a string of unknown length and I want to get the first three characters, or less if it's not that long. Today I can write s[:3]. With your proposal I would have to write s[:min(3, len(s))].

--Guido

On 4/19/07, Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com> wrote:

There is one thing I'd like to see changed in a future python. I always found it surprising, that >>> x = [1,2,3,4,5] >>> x[1:10] [2, 3, 4, 5]

is not an error. This is perhaps the only case (but a fundamental one!) where an error is silently ignored. I really can't think of a good justification for it. If I really meant x[1:] I would have said so.

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-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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