Alex Bowers wrote on 20/03/2015 13:40:
Still not sure how we can implement a range of strings. But since thats for a different feature, I'll leave that issue for now.
I can't resist a quick answer: if you can define a key-based slice at all, you can define it for both integer and string keys. Bear in mind the a:b here isn't a range, it's just a pair of values specifying which items to include in the slice.
If the definition of a key-based slice is "all elements whose key satisfies $key >= $a && $key <= $b", then you're just doing comparisons between strings, which are defined as lexical order. So $dictionary['elephant':'snake'] returns all elements with keys which sort lexically between 'elephant' and 'snake', regardless of whether the array is sorted.
Alternatively, a key-based slice could look up the position in the array of the two keys, and then perform a positional slice between those positions, i.e. $array[$a:$b] == $array[ @ key_position($array, $a) : key_position($array, $b) ]. I'm not sure that's particularly intuitive or useful, but again, it has no problem with string keys.
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