On Monday, 4 June 2012 at 19:55:49 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
On Sat, 02 Jun 2012 07:49:16 -0400, Dario Schiavon
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi,
I just read some old threads about opDollar and the wish to
have it work for non zero-based arrays, arrays with gaps,
associative arrays with non-numerical indices, and so on. It
was suggested to define opDollar as the end of the array
rather than the length (and perhaps rename opDollar to opEnd
to reflect this interpretation), so that collection[someIndex
.. $] would consistently refer to a slice from someIndex to
the end of the collection (of course the keys must have a
defined ordering for it to make sense).
I'm just thinking, if we want to generalize slices for those
cases, shouldn't we have a symmetrical operator for the first
element of the array? Since the $ sign was evidently chosen to
parallel the regexp syntax, why don't we add ^ to refer to the
first element? This way, collection[^ .. $] would slice the
entire collection, just like collection[].
Until now, ^ is only used as a binary operator, so this
addition shouldn't lead to ambiguous syntax. It surely
wouldn't be used as often as the opDollar, so I understand if
you oppose the idea, but it would at least make the language a
little more "complete".
I suggested this, and it was shot down rather pointedly by
Walter (with not very convincing arguments I might add).
Probably not much chance of success.
http://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected]
-Steve
Can you use "null"?
