Re: Range Types - typo + NULL string constructor

On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 10:25:18PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-10-11 at 03:14 +0200, Florian Pflug wrote:
> > Maybe ranges over discrete types are slightly more likely to be
> > closed, and ranges over continuous types slightly more likely to
> > be open. Still, I very much doubt that the skew in the
> > distribution is large enough to warrant the confusion and
> > possibility of subtle bugs we introduce by making the semantics of
> > a range type's constructor depend on the definition of the range
> > and/or base type.
> 
> I think you persuaded me on the consistency aspect.
> 
> I'm wondering whether to do away with the default argument entirely,
> and just force the user to always specify it during construction. It
> seems like a shame that such pain is caused over the syntax, because
> in a perfect world it wouldn't be a bother to specify it at all. I
> even considered using prefix/postfix operators to try to make it
> nicer, but it seems like every idea I had was just short of
> practical. Maybe a few extra characters at the end aren't so bad.
> 
> I'd like to hear from some potential users though to see if anyone
> recoils at the common case.

I'd recoil at not having ranges default to left-closed, right-open.
The use case for that one is so compelling that I'm OK with making it
the default from which deviations need to be specified.

Cheers,
David.
-- 
David Fetter <david@fetter.org> http://fetter.org/
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