<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><br>On 1 Jul 2014, at 11:44, Kim Bruce <<a href="mailto:kim@cs.pomona.edu">kim@cs.pomona.edu</a>> wrote:<br><br><blockquote type="cite">The construct (a..b) provides a list of numbers from a to b. Thus 1..4 gives [1,2,3,4].<br><br>The question is what should happen if a and b are non-integers. Here are some options, illustrated by 1.2 .. 5.5<br>1. Return an error -- this is only supposed to give ranges of integers<br>2. Return [1.2,2.2,3.2,4.2,5.2]. I.e, start with the initial value and go up to the last value <= upper bound.<br>3. Return [1.2,2.2,3.2,4.2] ????<br><br>The third is what currently happens in Grace. It only picks up the 5.2 when the upper bound reaches 6.<br><br>Either 1 or 2 is acceptable, though I'd have a very slight preference for 1 just because it is simpler.<br><br>What do we want the answer to be and then can we make the correction?<br></blockquote><br><div><br></div><div>Ranges in the collections module insist that their bounds are integers, and emit a runtime error if they are not.</div><div><br></div><div>I’m willing to update the compiler so that .. uses these ranges as soon as we like. Of course, this requires that every program (that uses ..) imports collections; th obvious way to do this is to put collections in the standard prelude.</div><div><br></div><div>I was thinking this morning that this (implicitly importing collections) is entirely reasonable. <i>Every</i> language that I have used, except Grace, provides basic collections (like arrays, or lists) built in, without having to say anything special. When a colleague was interested in using Grace for our algorithms class, it was a real turn-off to have to say “import "collections" as coll”.</div><div><br></div><div>If we just make list, set, dictionary, range, etc part of the StandardPrelude, then we would not need a prefix to access them. Bindings and Points are already in the StandardPrelude.</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Andrew</div><div><br></div></body></html>