”Bad idea. Great way to get off-by-one errors.”I would think that depends on whether that gets taught at schools early in life.
Intervals that are closed at the low and open at the high end also are convenient when using zero-based indexing (you want an easy way to express 0,1,2,…,n-1, and if you’re used to the notation [0,n) is nicer than [0,n-1])
I would think overloading the meaning of the various parentheses makes parsing and generating clear error messages harder, though (but not as hard as when one would follow ISO 31-11 and allow such things a ]3,7] for an half-open interval excluding 3, but including 7)
I think the desire to not overload parentheses with yet another meaning is why ‘Modern’ languages tend to use an infix operator for ranges, e.g. ‘1 to 5’ or ‘1...5’, with Swift having the half-open variant ‘1..<5’ (IMO ugly, but clear, so I guess one would get used to it).
I would think that depends on whether that gets taught at schools early in life.
Intervals that are closed at the low and open at the high end also are convenient when using zero-based indexing (you want an easy way to express 0,1,2,…,n-1, and if you’re used to the notation [0,n) is nicer than [0,n-1])
I would think overloading the meaning of the various parentheses makes parsing and generating clear error messages harder, though (but not as hard as when one would follow ISO 31-11 and allow such things a ]3,7] for an half-open interval excluding 3, but including 7)
I think the desire to not overload parentheses with yet another meaning is why ‘Modern’ languages tend to use an infix operator for ranges, e.g. ‘1 to 5’ or ‘1...5’, with Swift having the half-open variant ‘1..<5’ (IMO ugly, but clear, so I guess one would get used to it).