[nequo]

> number of elements to process is exactly the difference between last and first index of the range

And in Julia, it’s

  length(a:b)

which also works with non-unit step sizes like

  length(a:x:b)

The intent of these expressions seems clearer than the intent of `b-a` and `ceiling((b-a)/x)` with your proposed approach in a zero-indexed language.