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by LegionMammal978 689 days ago
Fine, it's 'accepted' in the basic sense that it doesn't throw an immediate error. But it also doesn't return any useful string, as Python would. So you'd need an extra step to feed its output into anything expecting a non-null string.

The inconsistency here is that when you call "abc".slice(2, 10) and get "c", Ruby has implicitly truncated the range to return whatever characters are available, even though it can't go all the way to 10 because the string isn't long enough. But then when you call "abc".slice(4, 10), it doesn't just give you all available characters from index 4 (which would be an empty string), it gives you null instead.
1 comments
randomdata 689 days ago
> The inconsistency here

I don't see the inconsistency. slice on Array works the same way. Where is the inconsistency?

> (which would be an empty string)

What other aspect of Ruby would suggest that it is an empty string?

If what you are struggling to say is that different languages are different, then okay. "Japanese is unlike the English I know and therefore is inconsistent" would be a rather bizarre take, though.

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LegionMammal978 688 days ago
> Where is the inconsistency?

Between what happens when the start index is greater than the length of the input, and what happens when the end index is greater than the length of the input. If the end index is greater than the length of the input, it returns a string (as long as the start index is not greater than the length of the input). But if the start index is greater than the length of the input, it does not return a string: it returns null, which is not a string.

My suggestion is that the behavior would have made more sense if it either returned a string in both cases (i.e., if it returned a string even if the start index is greater than the length of the input), or returned null in both cases (i.e., if it returned null whenever the end index is greater than the length of the input).

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randomdata 688 days ago
> Between what happens when the start index is greater than the length of the input, and what happens when the end index is greater than the length of the input.

Again, what makes that an inconsistency and not just a different language?

> My suggestion is that the behavior would have made more sense

On the basis of the start and end indices being equivalent. But are they? What attributes of the language should see us consider them to be?

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LegionMammal978 687 days ago
If you see no reason to think that the two indices ought to have been equivalent, then there is no inconsistency that you might care about.

> What attributes of the language should see us consider them to be?

None.

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randomdata 686 days ago
Maybe they are equivalent, but looking at what other languages do is irrelevant in determining that. If there is nothing else in Ruby to suggest that they are equivalent, then perhaps they are not?

I'm not sure where "care" enters into the picture. It's a computer language. For what reason would emotions be assigned to it?

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