Misc #16114: Naming of "beginless range"

• Status: Open
• Assignee: -

[pwim (Paul McMahon)]

#14799 introduces a "beginless range" to complement the already existing "endless range". However, "beginless" isn't an existing word in English. Since the term for something without a beginning is "beginingless", I'd propose renaming "beginless range" to "beginningless range".

[mrkn (Kenta Murata)]

Other candidates from mathematics:

• a range bounded below
• lower-unbounded range
• left-unbounded range

If we use "unbounded" for the minimum value of a range, we should rephrase "endless" with the following candidates:

• a range bounded above
• upper-unbounded range
• right-unbounded range

[mame (Yusuke Endoh)]

I know that it is an awkward word, but it came from Range#begin and Range#end. IMO, you can call it as you like.

[mame (Yusuke Endoh)]

• Related to Feature #15864: Proposal: Add methods to determine if it is an infinite range added

[duerst (Martin Dürst)]

mrkn (Kenta Murata) wrote:

Other candidates from mathematics:

• a range bounded below

Shouldn't this be "a range not bounded below"?

• lower-unbounded range
• left-unbounded range

If we use "unbounded" for the minimum value of a range, we should rephrase "endless" with the following candidates:

• a range bounded above

Same thing here.

[mrkn (Kenta Murata)]

duerst (Martin Dürst) wrote:

mrkn (Kenta Murata) wrote:

Other candidates from mathematics:

• a range bounded below

Shouldn't this be "a range not bounded below"?

Oops! The correct candidates are "a range unbounded below" and "a range unbounded above".

Thanks.

[shevegen (Robert A. Heiler)]

This shows that there are only two real problems in computer science:

• Giving things proper names
• Documenting code after the code has been written
• Off by one errors

:P

From the candidates, I somewhat like mrkn's suggestion here:

lower-unbounded range

I am not sure if it is an ideal candidate, but to me it conveys
a similar meaning as "beginless", in that it refers to the
"lower" area of a range - well, the part where it all begins. :P

(You can also use left/right, but I think if we only compare
lower/upper to left/right, to me lower/upper makes a bit more
sense than left/right, within this context.)

Note that I find "beginningless" to be a very clumsy word as well.
Obviously that word exists (example: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/beginningless)
but I find it ... awkward.

I do not have any real preference either way so, to be completely honest,
I am with mame here - I don't think it is that important, at the least not
that I would dwell that much thought on it. Thinking about good names is
often quite difficult - just look at HashWithIndifferentAccess.

[inopinatus (Joshua GOODALL)]

I hope this discussion leads to Ruby having Ranges congruent to all the mathematical intervals.

Today we have right-unbounded ranges, and left-unbounded ranges, and right-closed ranges, and left-closed ranges, and right-open ranges -- but no left-open ranges.

This is strange to me. It is like having the <, <=, >= operators, and forgetting >.

I think "beginningless" might be cumbersome. I would smile if the term "bottomless" was adopted.

[jeremyevans0 (Jeremy Evans)]

• Tracker changed from Bug to Misc
• Backport deleted (2.5: UNKNOWN, 2.6: UNKNOWN)