Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"bearophile" <bearophileh...@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:ij473k$1tfn$1...@digitalmars.com...
Andrei:
Aside from the fact that "range" has another meaning in D, the word does
not convey the notion that iota adds incremental steps to move from one
number to another. "Iota" does convey that notion.
I have accepted the "iota" name, it's short, easy to remember, it has one
historical usage in APL, and "Range" has another meaning in D (but it's
weird, and it's something you need to learn, it's not something a newbie
is supposed to know before reading D2 docs well. The name "interval" is
better, simpler to understand, but it's longer for a so common function).
But this answer of yours is stepping outside the bounds of reasonableness
:-) If you ask a pool of 20 programmers what range(10,20) or iota(10,20)
means, I'm sure more people will guess range() correctly than iota(). The
word range() do convey a complete enumeration of values in an interval.
iota() does not convey that.
Said all this, I suggest to introduce the first-class a..b interval syntax
in D (or even a..b:c), this is able to remove most (all?) usage of iota().
I like "interval", too.
I do think the name "iota" is a nice extra reason to just use a..b or a..b:c
like you say. It also makes it clear that it's a series of discrete values
rather than a true mathematical range, since that's exactly how foreach
already uses a..b: as a series of discrete values.
I don't like interval at all, because I don't think it includes the
notion of 'stepping'. An interval is just, everything from A to B,
without necessarily specifying how you reach everything in that
interval. Whereas iota includes the stepping.
(I would like to see intervals in the language, but just as an [a,b] pair).
OTOH iota() is unintuitive to me, and I do keep reading it as itoa().
Sadly I don't have any better suggestions.
