On Mon, 04 Jun 2012 16:13:49 -0400, Mehrdad <[email protected]> wrote:
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]
Can you use "null"?
Hm... now that null has its own type, I likely could.
I suppose that would map properly to 0.
-Steve
