Re: XML/HTML-specific ?< and ?> operators? (was Re: RFC 145 (alternate approach))

[Bart Lateur]

On 06 Sep 2000 18:04:18 -0700, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:

>I think the -1 indexing for "end of array" came from there.  Or at
>least, it was in Perl long before it was in Python, and it was in Icon
>before it was in Perl, so I had always presumed Larry had seen Icon.
>Larry?

Do not assume that these are the only languages that exist. There must
be hundreds of languages; see the famous "Free Compilers" list
(<http://www.idiom.com/free-compilers/>). At least a few of these do
support -1 for last array index.

p.s. Shall I bring up the "@array[2 .. -1] should do the proper thing"
requested feature again? Oops, I just did. I think implementing this
basically requires lazy evaluation of the (2 .. -1) thing, so when it
eventually needs to be turned into a list of numbers, [a] it is aware of
the fact that it's in an "list indexing context", and [b] it knows the
number of list items.

And yes, some of the other languages do properly support this feature.

-- 
        Bart.