On Tue, 13 Oct 1998, Dean Tribble wrote:
>
> > 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).
I think this may be a little too surprising a behaviour for just plain "..". When i write 1, 2, 3, ..., 9 the typical interpretation is that i started with 1 and finished with 9 and there are things missing in the middle. Likewise with "for x in (1..9)", for example. A closed-open interval has a certain asymmetry to it that is well expressed by the asymmetry of the operator "..!" (if a..b reads as "from a until b" then a..!b naturally reads as "from a until -- but not -- b").
I forget who else uses the ellipsis in this fashion other than Perl, but i'm have the impression that some other languages do and i've don't think i've ever seen closed-open as the default interpretation.
> > 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.
Sure, anything -- Mark, just please bless *one*.
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