On Friday, June 14, 2013 10:21:28 PM UTC-7, ian.l....@gmail.com wrote: >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.)
My understanding is that it's so the same index can be used in slicing a list into complementary parts. This also makes concatenation the inverse operation of slicing: Python 3.3.1 (default, Apr 17 2013, 22:30:32) [GCC 4.7.3] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> a = list(range(10)) >>> a [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] >>> a[:7] [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] >>> a[7:] [7, 8, 9] >>> a[:7] + a[7:] [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] It's a logical extension of the start-indexing-at-zero issue, when you think about it. Yes, you will make the occasional off-by-one error at first. You'll get over it. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
