On Jun 14, 2013 10:26 PM, <ian.l.came...@gmail.com> wrote: > I bet this is asked quite frequently, however after quite a few hours searching I haven't found an answer. > > What is the thinking behind stopping 'one short' when slicing or iterating through lists? > > By example; > > >>> a=[0,1,2,3,4,5,6] > >>> a > [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] > >>> a[2:5] > [2, 3, 4] > > To my mind, it makes more sense to go to 5. I'm sure there's a good reason, but I'm worried it will result in a lot of 'one-off' errors for me, so I need to get my head around the philosophy of this behaviour, and where else it is observed (or not observed.)
I find Dijkstra's explanation rather convincing: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html Cheers, Chris
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