<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Jan 20, 2017, at 2:58 PM, Saagar Jha via swift-evolution <<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" class="">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; float: none; display: inline !important;" class="">Sorry if I wasn’t clear; I’m looking for indexing using Int, instead of using formIndex.</span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></blockquote></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Question: why do you think integer indices are so desirable?</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Integer indexing is simple, but also encourages anti-patterns (tortured open-coded while loops with unexpected fencepost errors, conflation of positions and distances into a single type) and our goal should be to make most everyday higher-level operations, such as finding/tokenizing, so easy that Swift programmers don’t feel they need to resort to loops as often.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Examples where formIndex is so common yet so cumbersome that it would be worth efforts to create integer-indexed versions of string might be indicators of important missing features on our collection or string APIs. So do pass them along.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">(There are definitely known gaps in them today – slicing needs improving as the manifesto mentions for things like slices from an index to n elements later. Also, we need support for in-place remove(where:) operations. But the more commonly needed cases we know about that aren’t covered, the better)</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div></body></html>