[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > The extended slice notation comes from the > numeric community though where they are probably all former FORTRAN > programmers. I think the concept of start, stop, step (or stride?) is > pretty common there.
Yep. I do a bit of numerical work and the meaning of abc[::-1] is plain as day to me. One thing I'd like to point out is that few people seem to be thrown off when slices are used to twiddle list elements. A few days back there was a thread about reordering a list such as [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] as [1,4,7,2,5,8,3,6,9], and the advice was along the lines of a[0::3]+a[1::3]+a[2::3]. I don't remember any complaints about the the notation there. I think the problem here isn't the slice notation; it's the use of slice notation for something that seems conceptually distinct. People who aren't used to doing a lot of slicing don't always have the connection between "reversing" and "slicing" in mind. It wouldn't occur to them to accomplish a reverse with a slice, and it would surprise them a bit to see it. Carl -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
