"Guido van Rossum" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | BTW, if you're looking for a term describing range() that's better | than set or sequence, how about "series"? It's a mathematical word | that matches pretty exactly. (More accurately, I believe it's an | algebraic series.)
I believe you are thinking of arithmetic series. But in math (modern, at least), a series is a sum of a sequence or progression of terms. (1, 1/2, 1/4, ... is a sequence, 1+1/2+1/4... is a series.) The output of range constitutes an arithmetic sequence or progression (terms have a constant difference -- the step). Of course, it can also be regarded as a sequence of partial sums of the series start + step + step + ... + step whose underlying sequence is the trivial [step, step, step, ....] with successive differences 0 -- but this is not the standard view or usage. So 'progression' would be an even better near-synonym for 'sequence'. In common usage, a 'series' can be any group of related items ordered in time or space, but the ordering can be rather arbitrary. Most programmers take a sequence of math courses in definite order -- algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, and maybe even differential equations -- and learn a series of programming languages over their career in some order that is mostly haphazard. tjr _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
