On Sun, 18 Dec 2016 16:21:20 +0000, BartC wrote:
> On 18/12/2016 10:59, Paul Götze wrote:
>> Hi John,
>>
>> there is a nice short article by E. W. Dijkstra about why it makes
>> sense to start numbering at zero (and exclude the upper given bound)
>> while slicing a list. Might give a bit of additional understanding.
>>
>> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF
>
> (This from somebody who apparently can't use a typewriter?!)
>
> I don't know if the arguments there are that convincing. Both lower
> bounds of 0 and 1 are useful; some languages will use 0, some 1, and
> some can have any lower bound.
>
> But a strong argument for using 1 is that in real life things are
> usually counted from 1 (and measured from 0).
>
> So if you wanted a simple list giving the titles of the chapters in a
> book or on a DVD, on the colour of the front doors for each house in a
> street, usually you wouldn't be able to use element 0.
>
> As for slice notation, I tend to informally use (not for any particulr
> language) A..B for an inclusive range, and A:N for a range of length N
> starting from A.
>
> In Python you can also have a third operand for a range, A:B:C, which
> can mean that B is not necessarily one past the last in the range, and
> that the A <= i < B condition in that paper is no longer quite true.
>
> In fact, A:B:-1 corresponds to A >= i > B, which I think is the same as
> condition (b) in the paper (but backwards), rather (a) which is
> favoured.
>
> Another little anomaly in Python is that when negative indices are used,
> it suddenly switches to 1-based indexing! Or least, when -index is
> considered:
>
> x = [-4,-3,-2,-1]
>
> print x[-1] # -1 Notice the correspondence here...
> print x[-2] # -2
>
> x = [1, 2, 3, 4]
>
> print x[1] # 2 ...and the lack of it here print x[2]
> # 3
as I said earlier
take the indicates as being the spaces between the elements & it makes
much more sense
--
falsie salesman, n:
Fuller bust man.
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
