Julien Palard <julien+pyt...@palard.fr> added the comment:
I understand we like round-tripping represnetations, I think we like them because in much cases it's immediatly and unambiguously understandable by a Python developer. It's the best representation as it's the one conveying the most information. But `range(0, 10)` convery very few information, one may forget the "begin included, end excluded" rule (or even if the 2nd one is the end of the length). I think the following is more usefull: >>> range(10) <range object [0, 1, ..., 8, 9]> >>> range(10, 2) <range object []> >>> range(2, 10) <range object [2, 3, ..., 8, 9]> >>> range(2, 10, 2) <range object [2, 4, 6, 8]> >>> @steven: I dont think moving this to __str__ would help someone: I've never seen any student try `str(range(10))` in the repl, they all naturally try the bare `range(10)` and they're all presented with un-informative information. If someone is here to teach them to try with str, better try with list(range(10)) or *range(10). As for repr(range(0)) == repr(range(2, 2)) == repr(range(1, 5, -1)) I do not consider this a bug, they are all strictly equivalent as being the empty range (when speaking of a mathematical object, maybe not the in-memory struct). @raymond: I'm also not OK to teach `*repr(10)` during the first class. I personally go for `list(range(10))`, but I can only because I'm physically available when they ask why the information displayed is not what they expect. A lot of people are learning Python at home and they're probably just lost while being presented with the round-tripping representation. I don't really agree that changing the repr could break code doing `eval(repr(range(10)))`, is it really something people do? @nick: I agree changing the repr could break some doctests on function returning ranges, on the other hand I've never seen a function returning a range. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <https://bugs.python.org/issue35200> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
