I was thinking that "hey, what's wrong with map" but then I reread your code and found an answer: you are producing a list of 1 000 001 elements. Having an operator that just uses a count operand instead of a range with equally many elements can indeed have its use.

Though, I think introducing another operator or somesuch that would be a "reevaluating x operator" would border to operator bloating (as we have map which isn't unreadable if you know map). That could be said about a lot of the features and operators we love in Perl today (e.g. for (LIST) compared to C-style for (;;)), so I shouldn't say too much. But just because "we" are designing a language almost from scratch doesn't mean we should tuck in every feature we want. I think cleanlyness is good in a language, but so is DWIM and adaption for common tasks. These and other factors should be weighted against each other or we might end up with any of the extremes we dislike today.

But of course, it's always good to ponder and discuss issues like this if the question isn't "how should we tuck it in" but rather "does this provide real value and how would it fit".

Just my thought,
ihb

In reply to Re^3: Using x to build data structures considered harmful by ihb
in thread Using x to build data structures considered harmful by dws

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