[swift-evolution] Strings in Swift 4

[Brent Royal-Gordon]

> On Jan 20, 2017, at 2:45 PM, Dave Abrahams via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> on Fri Jan 20 2017, Joe Groff <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
>> Jordan points out that the generalized slicing syntax stomps on '...x'
>> and 'x...', which would be somewhat obvious candidates for variadic
>> splatting if that ever becomes a thing. Now, variadics are a much more
>> esoteric feature and slicing is much more important to day-to-day
>> programming, so this isn't the end of the world IMO, but it is
>> something we'd be giving up.
> 
> Good point, Jordan.

In my experiments with introducing one-sided operators in Swift 3, I was not able to find a case where you actually wanted to write `c[i...]`. Everything I tried needed to use `c[i..<]` instead. My conclusion was that there was no possible use for postfix `...`; after all, `c[i...]` means `c[i...c.endIndex]`, which means `c[i..<c.index(after: c.endIndex)]`, which violates a precondition on `index(after:)`.

If that's the case, you can reserve postfix `...` for future variadics features, while using prefix `...` for these one-sided ranges.

(Unless you're saying there should be no postfix `..<`, only postfix `...`. But that's not really consistent with the idea that a missing bound is replaced by the appropriate bound of the collection.)

-- 
Brent Royal-Gordon
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