opCaret to complement opDollar when specifying slices

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Mon, 04 Jun 2012 16:13:49 -0400, Mehrdad <wfunction at hotmail.com> wrote:

> On Monday, 4 June 2012 at 19:55:49 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> On Sat, 02 Jun 2012 07:49:16 -0400, Dario Schiavon  
>> <dario.schiavon at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I just read some old threads about opDollar and the wish to have it  
>>> work for non zero-based arrays, arrays with gaps, associative arrays  
>>> with non-numerical indices, and so on. It was suggested to define  
>>> opDollar as the end of the array rather than the length (and perhaps  
>>> rename opDollar to opEnd to reflect this interpretation), so that  
>>> collection[someIndex .. $] would consistently refer to a slice from  
>>> someIndex to the end of the collection (of course the keys must have a  
>>> defined ordering for it to make sense).
>>>
>>> I'm just thinking, if we want to generalize slices for those cases,  
>>> shouldn't we have a symmetrical operator for the first element of the  
>>> array? Since the $ sign was evidently chosen to parallel the regexp  
>>> syntax, why don't we add ^ to refer to the first element? This way,  
>>> collection[^ .. $] would slice the entire collection, just like  
>>> collection[].
>>>
>>> Until now, ^ is only used as a binary operator, so this addition  
>>> shouldn't lead to ambiguous syntax. It surely wouldn't be used as  
>>> often as the opDollar, so I understand if you oppose the idea, but it  
>>> would at least make the language a little more "complete".
>>
>> I suggested this, and it was shot down rather pointedly by Walter (with  
>> not very convincing arguments I might add).  Probably not much chance  
>> of success.
>>
>> http://forum.dlang.org/post/op.vco5zwhreav7ka@localhost.localdomain
>
> Can you use "null"?

Hm... now that null has its own type, I likely could.

I suppose that would map properly to 0.

-Steve