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.