The story of E, part 2 (fwd)

[Dean Tribble]

A few notes that I couldn't resist.

> My opinion is personal, and but one.  Perhaps it would be better to
> ask other people what they think.  Has anyone else given a view on
> this one?

If you only have one, make it a double.

> This looks to me like a battle worth fighting.  Better for us to
> curse and grumble about the explosion of types in Java while
> implementing E, than for generations of E programmers after us
> to curse *us* for it. :)

The same could be said about getting integer mod(division) right.

> > I've got the same ".." operator, but I hadn't thought of extending it to
> > characters.  A good suggestion.  Btw, whereas E's "x..y" expands to "x
> > thru(y)" and means "from x inclusive thru y inclusive", E's "x..!y" expands
> > to "x till(y)" and means the much more useful "from x inclusive till y
> > exclusive".  Closed-open intervals are almost always best.

> These are great!  I think ..! is a really cool syntactic innovation.

It seems that closed-open should be the default.  (e.g "x..y!" could mean
closed-closed).

> Hmm.  Regarding "len" vs. "length" vs. "size" ... can we just pick
> one and go with it everywhere?  Less guessing is probably better.
> I'm fine with any of them -- if you want to go with "length" to
> appease Java folk, that's great.

If you can stand some Java non-conformity, "count" has always seemed the best
generic term.