Thanks for the rationale.
As far as the ranged loop, I would expect a loop to iterate over the range specified, not the range minus one from the end. This seems intuitive to me.
is there a way to determine the minimum number of moves necessary? it would be nice to compare how one does
Possibly. Feel free to submit a pull request.
It catches me offguard too. For what it’s worth they have an inclusive range syntax as well:
for Index in 1..=5
{
do_something();
}
When I looked it up, the rationale given was because it was a 0 based indexing so most loops were of the form 0 to (length - 1), so they made the default range type non inclusive on the upper bound to make that simpler. It also mimic’ed the traditional for loop structure ( for(i=0; i<length; i++) => for i in 0 .. Length )
It’s a little loose for my taste, but I understand their thought process.
EDIT: This had some (old) discussion on it: `...` vs `..=` for inclusive ranges - #3 by japaric - ideas (deprecated) - Rust Internals
Wow. Looking at that very first sentence:
We’ve currently adopted
..as syntax for exclusive ranges and...as the syntax for inclusive ranges.
So glad I didn’t have to use Rust in 2015.
I know about the ..= syntax but in general we avoid indexing where I work. We can almost always avoid it by using functional iteration instead.
Nim and Kotlin have a syntax I like a bit better: .. means the same as in Ada, and ..< means a range that doesn’t include the last element.
He also writes,
It is my opinion that inclusive rangers are a relatively rare thing.
Wow. Not in my experience… Not with Ada anyway. And it always trips me up in every language that insists on 0-based indexing.
That’s because he’s most likely ONLY ever used c based languages.