It's definitely a revisitable choice, but that consideration would have to come along with some thought about how array indexing in general is implemented – which is something that we're due for.
On Saturday, March 29, 2014, Tom Lee <m...@tomlee.id.au> wrote: > Thanks for the heads up, maybe I'll just have to live with it and be more > careful... > > On Saturday, 29 March 2014 11:04:56 UTC-4, Stefan Karpinski wrote: >> >> That's not a good idea – or at least it's bound to cause you some nasty >> problems. There is a lot of indexing code in Base (and probably elsewhere >> too) that depends in individual Ints being iterable like this. I'm not a >> huge fan of it personally, but it seems be pretty handy when trying to >> write generic multidimensional array code – the idea being that a scalar >> behaves like a zero-dimensional tensor. In any case, it's not a thing that >> can be changed by itself without also changing a lot of other code that >> relies on the current behavior. >> >> On Mar 29, 2014, at 10:25 AM, Tom Lee <ma...@tomlee.id.au> wrote: >> >> I've only been using Julia a few weeks and typos of this sort must have >> cost me several hours of debugging in total. You have given me an idea >> though, I think I try to find the method in Base for iteration over an >> integer and edit it myself to make it raise an error. >> >> Cheers, >> Tom >> >> On Saturday, 29 March 2014 08:29:22 UTC-4, andrew cooke wrote: >>> >>> >>> sorry, i wasn't clear. >>> >>> Base defines the methods necessary for it for iteration "over" an >>> integer. >>> >>> julia> for i in 8 >>> print(i) >>> end >>> 8 >>> >>> i am suggesting this is not a good idea. >>> >>> andrew >>> >>> >>> >>> On Saturday, 29 March 2014 00:42:35 UTC-3, Leah Hanson wrote: >>>> >>>> You can make any type iterable (by defining start, next, and done); you >>>> could, if you wanted, make Int/Integer/whatever iterable. Making an Int >>>> literal a syntax error here would create inconsistent behavior when someone >>>> (inevitably) decides to iterate over Ints for some reason. >>>> >>>> I assume you got a NoMethod error about start? >>>> >>>> -- Leah >>>> >>>> >>>> On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 8:19 PM, andrew cooke <and...@acooke.org>wrote: >>>> >>>>> >>>>> maybe there's a good reason for this (i suspect there is, but i'm not >>>>> seeing it right now). but if there isn't, removing it might save some >>>>> poor >>>>> typist or confused newbie from a frustrated debugging session. >>>>> >>>>> the problem is that >>>>> >>>>> for i in 8 >>>>> ... >>>>> end >>>>> >>>>> isn't a syntax error (when what was meant was the range 1:8) >>>>> >>>>> cheers, >>>>> andrew >>>>> >>>> >>>>
