Just brain-dumping here:
Thomas did an excellent job on the patch! It's clean & crisp and, I think,
bulletproof. Just want that to be clear.
As the reviewer, I spent about 2 hours playing with it, trying it out in my
code. And I simply liked it less the more I used it; e.g.,
for i in [:len(a)]:
a[i] += 1
struck me as clumsier and uglier than
for i in range(len(a)):
a[i] += 1
at once-- which I expected due to the novelty --but didn't grow on me at
*all*. Which is saying something, since I'm the world's longest-standing
fan of "for i indexing a" <wink>; i.e., I'm *no* fan of the range(len(...))
business, and this seems even worse. Despite that I should know 100x better
at all levels, I kept finding myself trying to write stuff like
for i in [:a]: # or [len(a)] a couple times, even [a:] once
a[i] += 1
Charles likes slices. Me too! I *love* them. But as a standalone notation
(i.e., not as a subscript), part of the glory of slicing breaks down: for
the list a, a[:] makes good sense, but when *iterating* over a, it's
suddenly [:len(a)] because there's no context to supply a correct upper
bound.
For 2.0, the question is solely yes-or-no on this specific notation. If it
goes in, it will never go away. I was +0 at first, at best -0 now. It does
nothing for me I can't do just as easily-- and I think more clearly --with
range. The kinds of "extensions"/variations mentioned in the PEP make me
shiver, too.
Post 2.0, who knows. I'm not convinced Python actually needs another
arithmetic-progression *list* notation. If it does, I've always been fond
of Haskell's range literals (but note that they include the endpoint):
Prelude> [1..10]
[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
Prelude> [1, 3 .. 10]
[1,3,5,7,9]
Prelude> [10, 9 .. 1]
[10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1]
Prelude> [10, 7 .. -5]
[10,7,4,1,-2,-5]
Prelude>
Of course Haskell is profoundly lazy too, so "infinite" literals are just as
normal there:
Prelude> take 5 [1, 100 ..]
[1,100,199,298,397]
Prelude> take 5 [3, 2 ..]
[3,2,1,0,-1]
It's often easier to just list the first two terms than to figure out the
*last* term and name the stride. I like notations that let me chuckle "hey,
you're the computer, *you* figure out the silly details" <wink>.
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