Forrest Voight wrote:
I am not sure what you are trying to propose here. The slice object isn't special, it's just a regular built-in type.
The idea is to have slice objects be generators. You could make a slice like 1:10:2 , and that would make a slice object which could be used as a list index. The list would return a list with the corresponding item for every index in the generator. Then, lists could transparently be used as list indexes, or you could supply your own generator instead of a slice object.
You can already pass whatever items you like to __getitem__ for your own sequences without even touching the builtin slice(). You can even write a decorator to convert slice objects to the relatively arbitrary index iterators you appear to favour (I wish you good luck in getting those to play well with numpy and the myriad of other C extensions that rely on the existing extended slicing semantics, or explaining how they work to a Python novice - you're going to need it). That said, and as Alexandre already pointed out, this thread is off-topic for python-dev - please take it to python-ideas to thrash out whether or not it has any practical applications, and whether those applications (assuming they exist) are even remotely close to compelling enough to justify the pain involved in making such a major change to the core language. Regards, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia --------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.boredomandlaziness.org