On Thu, Oct 06, 2016 at 04:19:17PM -0700, Neil Girdhar wrote:
Currently str(slice(10)) returns "slice(None, 10, None)"
If the start and step are None, consider not emitting them. Similarly slice(None) is rendered slice(None, None, None).
When you're printing a lot of slices, it's a lot of extra noise.
I have an alternative suggestion. Wouldn't it be nice if slice objects looked something like the usual slice syntax? If you think the answer is No, then you'll hate my suggestion :-) Let's keep the current repr() of slice objects as they are, using the full function-call syntax complete with all three arguments show explicitly: repr(slice(None, None, None)) => "slice(None, None, None)" But let's make str() of a slice more suggestive of actual slicing, and as a bonus, make slices easier to create too. str(slice(None, None, None)) => "slice[:]" Let the slice type itself be sliceable, as an alternate constuctor: slice[:] => returns slice(None) slice[start:] => returns slice(start, None) slice[:end] => returns slice(None, end) slice[start::step] => returns slice(start, None, step) and so forth. (This probably would require changing the type of slice to a new metaclass.) And then have str() return the compact slice syntax. At worst, the compact slice syntax is one character longer than the optimal function syntax: # proposed slice str() slice[:7] # 9 characters # proposed compact str() slice(7) # 8 characters # current str() slice(None, 7, None) # 20 characters but it will be more compact more often: slice[1:] # 9 characters versus: slice(1, None) # 14 characters slice(None, 1, None) # 20 characters -- Steve