1 Nov
2004
1 Nov
'04
4:36 p.m.
One such use case: Consider that you have a string x and another string y that is a suffix to x. You want to get the substring of x that ends where the suffix starts.
o If from-the-end indexing starts at -1 going downwards, you have to write like this:
x[..< -sizeof (y) - 1]
I.e. both a negation and an off-by-one adjustment are necessary.
o If from-the-end indexing starts at 1 going upwards:
x[..< sizeof (y) + 1]
o If from-the-end indexing starts at 0 going upwards:
x[..< sizeof (y)]
So in this specific case, the last alternative leads to the simplest code. There must be more such common use cases.