Pre-RFC: Extended array literal syntax

Calling this a pre-RFC is a bit of a stretch, but…

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could write [0, 14, 3, 72, 8; 10] and have the last element repeated 10 times? It’s a generalization of the already-supported [0, 14, 3, 72, 8] and [8; 10] literal syntaxes.

Definitely more of an “Idea” than a “Pre-RFC” :stuck_out_tongue:

I suppose it could even extend to [0;3, 1, 0;6] for [0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0], though I don’t know if that’s a good idea.

No, I think not. Its semantics is highly non-obvious. For example, having used various kinds of scientific and numerical software and libraries (e.g. R and Numpy) I'm used to repetition applying to a whole sequence instead of just one element. But that has its own problems too (and I don't like it either); for example, what to do when the number of specified elements doesn't evenly divide the repeat count?

Unless this solves a real and significant problem that is impossible or prohibitively hard to solve otherwise, I'd not like to see this kind of clever but ultimately confusing shorthand syntax in Rust.

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Ah that’s a good point. I hadn’t considered that interpretation. Probably best not to then :slight_smile:

This is definitely the kind of thing that’s better off as a proc-macro.

That said, I’d definitely like more flexible ways to declare large tables. I’d be nice to have e.g.

x[1..3] = [1, 2, 3];

available… though I don’t think this generalizes nicely (you need to synthesize bounds checks for slices… and size/alignment checks for trait objects, which seems super confusing).

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