[Submission] D Slices

[eles]

> The right boundary of a slice is exclusive.

I think it should be stated more obvious in the paper.

> This makes sense, so you can
> do stuff like a[1..$] (== a[1..a.length]) to get a slice that
contains
> all elements of a except for the first one (a[0]).

I disagree, but I have not much influence here, although I will
defend my point of view. I find it quite unpleasant to remember which
of the left and right bounds are exclusive and, moreover, this
precludes slicing with a[i1..i2] where i1 and i2 are only known at
the runtime and may be i2<i1 (and not necessarily i1<i2).

You will be forced to do smthng like:

if(i1>i2)
 b=a[i1..i2]
else
 b=a[i2..i1]
end

and is easy to forget (several lines below) if a[i1] or a[i2] still
belongs to the slice or no.

For example, it would be marvellous to implement definite integral
convention as: int(a,i1,i2)=sign(i1-i2)*sum(a[i1..i2]) w.r.t. the
mathematical convention.

For me, the right solution would have been to consider the selection a
[0..$-1] to select all the elements of the array. This way, "$" still
means "the length" and one has a clear view of the selection going
from a[0] to a["length"-1] as expected by someone used to 0-based
indexes. The slicing would be always inclusive, which is a matter of
consistence (and goes in line with Walter speaking about the car
battery). Why to break this convention?

If it is wrong, design it to appear being wrong.