Why don't other programming languages have ranges?

[Don]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 07/24/2010 08:36 AM, Justin Johansson wrote:
>> It sounds like the D PL has invented the range idiom unlike any other PL.
>>
>> Since the dawn of PL's, which must be about 50 years now since Lisp
>> for example, it is hard to imagine a new PL inventing a completely
>> new idiom as "ranges" seem to purport. Given the many academic
>> arguments for ranges as opposed to iterators, why is it that the
>> D PL seems to be the major if not only sponsor of the range idiom?
>>
>> Is D really taking the lead here and is it likely that other PL's
>> will eventually take D's lead?
>>

> Third, ranges were "in the air" already at the time I formalized them. 
> Boost and Adobe had notions of "range", even though all their primitives 
> were to expose begin() and end(), so they were essentially lackeys of 
> the STL iterator abstraction. People were talking about "range" whenever 
> they discussed two iterators delimiting a portion of a container. It was 
> only a matter of time until someone said, hey, let's make range a 
> first-class abstraction.

It's also worth noting that one of the primary advocates of ranges in 
C++ was Matthew Wilson, who was hugely influential in the early years of 
D. Even the limited ranges that exist in Boost, are somewhat influenced 
by D.