[randomdata]

> That's why if you put five or more in for the first index it fails to produce a result entirely.

Where does this come from? Are these discrepancies stemming from different Ruby implementations/versions behaving differently? "abc".slice(5, 10) returns the same value as "abc".slice(4, 10) [which, curiously, does not return the same value as the original comment] under MRI 2.6.1 that I had handy.

[sqeaky]

I believe I got it from the book Ruby under the microscope. Which looked at what is now a really old version of Ruby, and if they changed it to make a API more consistent that's probably good.