Grouping code by indentation - feature or ******?

Reinhold Birkenfeld wrote:
> Jacob Lee wrote:> > >>About slices:>>>>I agree that Python's slice boundaries (some_list[a:b] being all elements>>with a <= index < b) are counterintuitive at first. But this method does>>satisfy some handy properties, the first of which being:>>  l[:n] + l[n:] = l> > > And best of all, this is true for _every_ n, at least for the standard> slice implementations...> > >>Secondly, the range() function behaves identically to slices, meaning that>>  for i in range(10):>>will iterate 10 times, and>>  for i in range(len(l)):>>will iterate over the indices of the sequence l.>>>>If you had l[a:b] be inclusive on both a and b (instead of inclusive on a>>and exclusive on b), you would have to be adding and subtracting one in>>all of these examples, leading that much more easily to off-by-one errors.> > > It would be not so much adding/subtracting if list indices started at 1,> but who on earth would want that? ;)> > Reinhold
You certainly do get lots of adding/subtracting even if they start at 1.
For example the length of lst[a : b] would be (a - b + 1).  I certainly
had my share of fencepost problems in Fortran I, II, IV, V ...

--Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org