On 9/17/07, Robert Bradshaw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > It sounds from what you write though, that it is best to just stick
> > with the "upload" / "download" terminology, since it is *very* clear
> > in which direction the file goes in each case. Upload means "goes
> > to the server (SAGE notebook), and download means it goes to
> > your local hard drive.
>
> I really like the "open" and "save" terminology best--it even brings
> up "open" and "save" dialogs. Download/upload is much less intuitive
> (I think it should almost be transparent that there is even a "server").
OK, cool. Could some other people vote?
> > A better solution would, as you suggest, to define a function like
> > > range -- but not called range -- that includes both endpoints.
> > > One possibly nasty possibility would be to allow Magma-like
> > > notation:
> > > sage: [1..4]
> > > [1, 2, 3, 4]
> > > I can't think of any situation where .. (not in a string) is
> > valid Python,
> > > so the above might be a reasonable option.
> > >
> >
> > This sounds like a great idea! I like having the lower bound
> > explicit.
> >
> > I wonder if there would be some consistent way to make 1..4 stand for
> > an iterator, and [1..4] a list. Hmm: then since we'd want [2,3,5..9]
> > to be a list, we'd want 2,3,5..9 to be an iterator, whereas (2,3,5..9)
> > would presumably be a tuple, which seems problematic. Is there a
> > clean way to handle this?
>
> I like this a lot too, and think it would be worth modifying the
> preparser to do. The range starting at 0 is natural for me, but it
> seems to trip a lot of (non-programmers) up.
Robert, Since you do so much work on Cython, maybe you could think
about the formal specification of the Python language and see whether
..
not appearing in a string is ever valid Python. I.e., could we add
[expr1 .. expr2]
to the language without running into problems?
Maybe
(expr1 .. expr2)
should return a generator and
[expr1 .. expr2]
should return a list.
And, if anybody out there thinks adding the above to the preparser
would make you positively cringe in disgust, please speak up!
(It doesn't mean we won't add it anyways...)
-- William
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