On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 12:07 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> wrote:
If range.stop were allowed to be None, as is slice.stop, we also would not need itertools.count, which is the third way we represent a virtual stepped subsequence of ints.
No, you don't want to do that - being finite is an important property of range objects. The thing about slice objects is that they're deliberately incomplete - you need to supply a sequence length in order to "realise" them. This is done via slice.indices(container_len) Now, *there's* a powerful use case in favour of making 3.x range behave just like a tuple of integers: we could update slice.indices() to return one of those instead of wastefully creating the full tuple of indices in memory the way it does now. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia