[ncl-talk] Feature request: Negative indexes

[Kyle Griffin]

Given someone who often finds himself in shoes similar to Alan's, at least
with regard to python, the syntax of x(-1) often slips through my
fingertips in NCL as well.

I also can't think of any immediate downsides, as I believe there is no
acceptable or legal use of negative non-coordinate indices in NCL
currently, and I would think no reasonably constructed code would be
'dependent' on errors thrown by attempting to use such indices.

Lastly, there are a number of times in which I've used syntax such as
x(0:dimsizes(x)-2), which, perhaps unintuitively, reads all but the last 1
item.

Just consider this another vote in favor, pending any future discovery of
downsides.

Thanks for considering...


Kyle

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 7:17 PM David Brown <dbrown at ucar.edu> wrote:

> I agree that negative indexes would be great and we don't know what
> the downsides are either, although we would probably find out if we
> tried to implement them.
>  -dave
>
> On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 2:41 PM, Alan Brammer <abrammer at albany.edu> wrote:
> > Not sure if this has been brought up before but I’d really like the
> ability to fetch the last index of an array using x(-1), or similarly the
> last n of the array x(-n:)
> >
> > Being in a mostly javascript/python world outside of NCL negative
> indexes have been quite useful.
> >
> > Any plans or possibility of this becoming a thing, or are there
> downsides I’m not thinking of?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Alan
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