Stupid little iota of an idea

[Nick Sabalausky]

"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote in message 
news:ij473k$1tfn$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 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().
>

I like "interval", too.

I do think the name "iota" is a nice extra reason to just use a..b or a..b:c 
like you say. It also makes it clear that it's a series of discrete values 
rather than a true mathematical range, since that's exactly how foreach 
already uses a..b: as a series of discrete values.