A few months ago, there was a thread on ESDiscuss [1] where somebody asked for
native `Range` support,
i.e. numeric ranges, string ranges, etc.
It seems like it didn't receive much attention, so I'd like to bring this up
for discussion again.
If you were to iterate from X to Y, you would usually use a `for` loop that
uses a loop variable `i`,
which you would declare with `let`. You can't use `const`, since you'll have to
increment it, and you
don't want to use `var`, because it makes no sense to make a reference to `i`
outside of the loop,
unless you were to re-use the loop variable for further loops.
In other words, you're forced to choose a scope where other scopes barely make
any sense.
Having a for-loop that abstracts over this needless explicitness could help
make the concept of
iteration more declarative.
Python has `range()` (but no for loops that create ranges) [2], and Scala
introduced two for-loop syntaxes
that will create ranges for you:
```scala
for (i <- 1 to 10) { … } // 10 inclusive
for (i <- 1 until 10) { … } // 10 exclusive
```
There's a plethora of npm packages that implement ranges, the most popular one
apparently being `fill-range`
with 7.4 million downloads a month, so it seems that the community would
appreciate native support a lot.
I've searched through some proposals, but couldn't find anyone currently
writing a spec for it.
Is there general interest for ranges at TC39? It struck me as odd that the only
thing I found about them in ES was [1].
[1] https://esdiscuss.org/topic/feature-request-add-range-type-data
[2] https://docs.python.org/3/library/functions.html#func-range
[3] https://www.npmjs.com/package/fill-range
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