Re: select

[David Given <dg@...>]

Michael Roth wrote:
[...]
> Maybe, 'first' should be really called 'head'.

I'm really not keen on the idea of cluttering up the global namespace 
with lots of new functions; it's full enough as it is.

As this is a low-level, fundamental feature, it does make sense to have 
it part of the syntax rather than a library extension... is there any 
reason why the [] operator can't be extended?

 (...)[1] --- pick the first element
 (...)[-1] --- pick the last element
 (...)[4, 3] --- pick a range of elements

The (...) could be made implicit without introducing ambiguities, which 
means that you can do things like...

 for i=1, 10 do
   print([i])

Which, you'll have to admit, is slightly neater than using a function, 
as well as making it more obvious that you're doing something strange.

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