Range Operation pre-PEP

[Alex Martelli]

"Greg Ewing" <see at my.signature> wrote in message
news:3AF8D070.B0ECF09A at my.signature...
    [snip]
> The alternative, making the endpoint exclusive,
> would make the meaning of the .. construct
> somewhat unintuitive.


for x in seq[a:b]:
    print x


versus


for i in a..b:
    print seq[i]


My own intuition would expect the same behavior
from these two loops.  I would consider it VERY
unintuitive to have them behave differently!!!

Maybe this should be accepted and reinforced
with a different syntax for the range, e.g.

for i in [a:b]:
    print seq[i]

with the existing brackets-and-colons tokens
in lieu of the new proposed '..' token.  Now
the fact that b is excluded, just as in s[a:b],
should perhaps be even more obvious...?


Alex