Stupid little iota of an idea

[bearophile]

Andrei:

> Aside from the fact that "range" has another meaning in D, the word does 
> not convey the notion that iota adds incremental steps to move from one 
> number to another. "Iota" does convey that notion.

I have accepted  the "iota" name, it's short, easy to remember, it has one historical usage in APL, and "Range" has another meaning in D (but it's weird, and it's something you need to learn, it's not something a newbie is supposed to know before reading D2 docs well. The name "interval" is better, simpler to understand, but it's longer for a so common function).

But this answer of yours is stepping outside the bounds of reasonableness :-) If you ask a pool of 20 programmers what range(10,20) or iota(10,20) means, I'm sure more people will guess range() correctly than iota(). The word range() do convey a complete enumeration of values in an interval. iota() does not convey that.

Said all this, I suggest to introduce the first-class a..b interval syntax in D (or even a..b:c), this is able to remove most (all?) usage of iota().

Bye,
bearophile