From: mortee <mortee.lists@...>
Date: 2007-10-13T01:42:21+09:00
Subject: Re: range max

Brian Adkins wrote:
> On Oct 12, 8:56 am, Yossef Mendelssohn <ymen...@pobox.com> wrote:
>> On Oct 11, 9:55 pm, Brian Adkins <lojicdot...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I was thinking Range#last, but that has the same problem as Range#end
>> (probably one is an alias for the other).
>>
>> (1..10).last (or end) => 10
>> (1..10).max           => 10
>>
>> (1...10).last (or end) => 10
>> (1...10).max           => 9
>>
>> What you want is something like
> 
> Actually, what you want is simply N. It's a nonsensical request from a
> troll. Using max, end, last, etc. to find the end of the range is
> ridiculous since you must know the end of the range to define the
> range!

Ehhh... it's actually quite probable that the OP was indeed just insult
- however, you all seem to assume that the same person provides both the
range and wants to know its max.

If e.g. you write a method, which accepts various types of arguments,
then you can't know in advance if it'll be a range, array or something
else. So you have to use #max - and then one might expect that a range
(however big the span is) can compute it in constant time.

So the OP had *some* validity, while this still doesn't have anything to
do with the quality of the language itself. Just one spot where the it
might possibly be enhanced a bit.

mortee