Bryan Olson wrote: > Steve Holden wrote: > > Paul Rubin wrote: > > We are arguing about trivialities here. Let's stop before it gets > > interesting :-) > > Some of us are looking beyond the trivia of what string.find() > should return, at an unfortunate interaction of Python features, > brought on by the special-casing of negative indexes. The wart > bites novice or imperfect Python programmers in simple cases > such as string.find(), or when their subscripts accidentally > fall off the low end. It bites programmers who want to fully > implement Python slicing, because of the double-and- > contradictory- interpretation of -1, as both an exclusive ending > bound and the index of the last element. It bites documentation > authors who naturally think of the non-negative subscript as > *the* index of a sequence item. > > Sure. I wrote two days ago:
> We might agree, before further discussion, that this isn't the most > elegant part of Python's design, and it's down to history that this tiny > little wart remains. While I agree it's a trap for the unwary I still don't regard it as a major wart. But I'm all in favor of discussions to make 3.0 a better language. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
