[swift-evolution] Strings in Swift 4

[Xiaodi Wu]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 5:04 PM, Matthew Johnson <matthew at anandabits.com>
wrote:

>
> I think it’s fair to say that we get to decide on the semantics of postfix
> `…`.  “a range with no upper bound” is very reasonable, but wouldn’t
> another reasonable semantics be “all the rest”, meaning that there *is* an
> upper bound (the greatest possible value).
>

"All the rest" is by itself insufficient so far as semantics: all the rest
_of what_? Supposing that our supplied lower bound is an integer, it must
be all the rest of the integers. It cannot be all the rest of whatever,
where whatever might be a collection that you try to subset with `0...`.
(Recall that collections move indices, but indices know nothing about the
collections.) It would be exceeding fuzzy for postfix `...` to mean "all
the rest of whatever I want it to mean"--that, almost tautologically, has
no semantics at all.

Under the latter semantics, a `for i in 0…` loop would terminate after
> reaching Int.max.  This is probably not what the user intended and would
> still crash when used in David’s example, but it’s worth considering.
>

OK, I'm borderline fine with `0... == 0...Int.max`. It at least provides
some semantics (i.e., we're saying `...` refers to all the rest of the
values representable by the type used for the lower bound) [**]. But
Jaden's point still stands, since it would only be consistent if `for i in
arr[0...]` then traps after `arr.count` just like `for i in
arr[0...Int.max]` would do. Otherwise, we really are fudging the semantics.

[**] It is not perfectly consistent semantically because, as was discussed
in threads about our numeric protocols, our integer types are supposed to
model all integers, not just the ones that happen to be representable. Our
model is imperfect because not all integers fit into finite memory, but
that's a modeling artifact and not intentional semantics. IIUC, it would be
otherwise difficult to give a good accounting of, say, the semantics of
addition if arithmetic overflow were an intentional part of the semantics
and not an artifact.

I’m not sure if you read Ben’s post regarding `enumerated` or not, but he
> gave the example of `zip(0…, sequence)` as a more general replacement for
> `enumerated`.  IMO, he makes a pretty strong case for this.
>
>
>
> - Dave Sweeris
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