A couple of off the wall questions. It seems to me that there is usually a solid *reason* for things in Python and I'm wondering about the rationale for the way slicing works:
my_string[2:5] gets you the 3rd through the 3rd through the 5th character of the string because indexing starts at 0 and you get everything up to, but not including the second index. Why? It doesn't seem intuitive to me. To me, it makes it harder, not easier, to work with slices than if indexing started at 1 and the above expression got you the 2nd throught the 5th character. Another thing that I've been puzzling over is the pow() function. pow(x,y) gives x**y. Fine. But pow(x,y,z) gives (x**y) % c I'm curious to know what the pressing reason for such a feature was. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
