[swift-evolution] [Draft]: Introducing a striding(by:) method on 3.0 ranges

[Xiaodi Wu]

What types do you have in mind that would only support positive distances?
All numeric types (yes, even UInt, etc.) have signed distances, which
reflects the basic mathematical abstraction of a number line.

A consistent behavior with signed distances is so important that we are
currently struggling with an interesting issue with floating point types,
which is that due to rounding error 10.0 + a - a != 10.0 for some values of
a.

On Sun, Apr 10, 2016 at 12:53 PM Haravikk via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:

>
> On 10 Apr 2016, at 11:17, Brent Royal-Gordon <brent at architechies.com>
> wrote:
>
> Why not just assign it the correct sign during the init function?
> (0 ... 6).striding(by: 2) // [0, 2, 4, 6], end > start, so stride = by
> (6 ... 0).striding(by: 2) // [6, 4, 2, 0], start > end, so stride = -by
>
>
> One reason not to do it this way is that, if we extend `striding(by:)` to
> other collections, they will not be as easy to walk backwards through as
> this. You will have to do something like
> `collection.reversed().striding(by:)` which will be a hassle.
>
>
> Any thoughts on the alternative I mentioned a little earlier to define
> overloads instead of positive/negative? i.e- you would have two methods,
> .striding(forwardBy:) and .striding(backwardBy:). In addition to
> eliminating the use of a negative stride to indicate direction, this has
> the advantage that .striding(backwardBy:) can be defined only for types
> with a ReverseIndex or only for collections (as you can stride through a
> sequence, but only by going forward).
>
> This should also make documentation a bit clearer, otherwise you’ve got
> the caveat that to go backwards requires a negative value, but only if the
> type supports that, which a developer would then need to check. Instead it
> either has the backwardBy variant or not.
>
> I know that advance(by:) supports negative values, but this is actually
> something I wouldn’t mind seeing changed as well, as it has the same issues
> (passing a negative value in looks fine until you realise the type is a
> ForwardIndex only). It would also allow us to define Distance types that
> don’t support a direction, since this would be given by the choice of
> method called instead.
>
>
> Of course I’d still like to be able to define 6 … 0 or whatever, but this
> would at least eliminate what I dislike about using negatives for direction.
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