complement to $

[Walter Bright]

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Fri, 14 May 2010 13:33:57 -0400, Walter Bright 
> <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> 
>> Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>> So how does this look:  coll[^..$];
>>
>> nooooooooo <g>
> 
> Do you have specific objections, or does it just look horrendous to you 
> :)  Would another symbol be acceptable?


The problem is D already has a lot of syntax. More syntax just makes the 
language more burdensome after a certain point, even if in isolation it's a good 
idea.

One particular problem regex has is that few can remember its syntax unless they 
use it every day.


>>> Thoughts? other ideas?
>>
>> I'd just go with accepting the literal 0. Let's see how far that goes 
>> first.
> 
> I thought of a counter case:
> 
> auto tm = new TreeMap!(int, uint);
> tm[-1] = 5;
> tm[1] = 6;
> 
> What does tm[0..$] mean?  What about tm[0]?  If it is analogous to 
> "beginning of collection" then it doesn't make any sense for a container 
> with a key of numeric type.
> 
> Actually any map type where the indexes don't *always* start at zero are 
> a problem.

I'd question the design of a map type that has the start at something other than 0.