On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Andrew Robinson <andr...@r3dsolutions.com> wrote: > FYI: I was asking for a reason why Python's present implementation is > desirable... > > I wonder, for example: > > Given an arbitrary list: > a=[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12] > > Why would someone *want* to do: > a[-7,10] > Instead of saying > a[5:10] or a[-7:-2] ?
A quick search of local code turns up examples like this: if name.startswith('{') and name.endswith('}'): name = name[1:-1] If slices worked like ranges, then the result of that would be empty, which is obviously not desirable. I don't know of a reason why one might need to use a negative start with a positive stop, though. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list