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Comment by bobbylarrybobby | Hacker News Reader

Not just that, but ranges are inclusive on both ends.

Ha, I was thinking of replying to your parent comment, "Half-open ranges are such an unpleasant thing as to be unforgivable to me. Different subjective preferences."

I've always found 0-indexing mildly unpleasant too, even though C was the language I learnt programming with, and felt like I found home when I came across 1-indexed languages.

With half open ranges, the length of the range is the end minus the beginning, which is nice. It's also much more simpler to write an empty half inclusive range. For instance if left=right then left..right would be the empty range. Whereas in Julia I'd need... left:(right-1)? But is 1:0 the empty range or the right-to-left inclusive range [1,0]? Very confusing and hard to work with all around.

> With half open ranges, the length of the range is the end minus the beginning, which is nice.

But I already know from real life that if there's maintanence in blocks 5 to 15, that's eleven blocks under maintanence. With half-open ranges, it once again introduces confusion and makes things unintuitive.

We can each find countless examples where each style comes out better, for eg `1:N` most often expresses the intent better than `range(N+1)`. I find people who prefer half-open ranges to be weird and incomprehensible, you probably find my preferences the same, I just don't like the categorical statement often made in this regard that one is inherently and universally superior to the other.

Yes, range(n+1) is bad. I hate python as well. You want something like Rust’s m..n and m..=n to have the choice. Anyway, if you have half open ranges, it's trivial to get a closed range (add one to the right endpoint), but going the other direction is not so simple.

Julia ranges are not composable, period

In Python, C/C++ and its descendant

[0...N)=[0...N/2)+[N/2...N)

Little do Julia fans know they're missing out on gems like range(n - 1, -1, -1).

Isn't that just n-1:-1:0 in Julia?

Was this sarcasm?

Naaaah.

I think the point was that in Julia is n:-1:1 since although rangers don't compose, they do reverse (unlike python)

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