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range Failure?

Peter Hansen peter at engcorp.com
Sun Mar 10 19:34:36 EST 2002 
Bengt Richter wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 10 Mar 2002 11:07:18 -0500, "Colin J. Williams" <cjw at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> [...]
> >It might say:
> >
> >     range([start= 0,] stop[, step= 1])
> 
> Still, the two optional []'s are not valid in all combinations,
> (which is what you fix with your improved text ;-)
> so maybe it should say something like:
> 
>      range([start= 0,] stop)          # where step defaults to 1, or
>      range(start, stop [, step= 1])

Why not be very explicit, rather than fancy and confusing?  
The above is an improvement over the original, but perhaps 
this is better?

  range(stop)                   # start is 0, step is 1
  range(start, stop [, step=1])

Answering my own question: the first of the three is pretty bad.
The second one suffers from implying that Python can have optional
positional arguments which come before non-optional ones.  The 
third suffers from implying (perhaps?) that Python can have 
overloaded methods.

Since range() doesn't take keyword arguments, even my second
one above could be considered a little bit confusing, if you 
think that implies you can say range(1, 6, step=2) which you
cannot.

-Peter
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