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Comment by david90 | Hacker News Reader

It's all about programming practice. I do like the suggestion `between(x1, x2)`.

When someone says that, I always get confuse as to whether you meant an inclusive or an exclusive between. I think the mathematicians uses the square brackets to indicate that intention.

That is exactly why we have <, <= (≤), >, and >= (≥) in programming languages. It is a lot less verbose than saying exclusiveBetween(x, 5, 10).

That could actually be an interesting linguistics problem. In spoken languages, "between" is usually inclusive unless context suggests otherwise. It can easily be a source of misunderstanding if the context clues are insufficient or the recipient has trouble picking up on them. I wonder if there are any languages that have different words for inclusive/exclusive "between" so people don't have to rely on implicit clues.

One possible convention would be to use "in-between" for the exclusive between. It's probably impossible to convince the whole English-speaking world to adopt it, but it would be more natural than "exclusive between" in code.

Agree. Perhaps it be better-named 'betweenInclusive(firstValue, secondValue)' and 'betweenExclusive(firstValue, secondValue)'

There are a few notations for intervals in maths; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_%28mathematics%29

There are arithmetic operators for intervals and IEEE standards! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_arithmetic#Elementary...

https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Between.html

Which is particularly useful for symbolically representing queries for entities.

EntityClass["Element", "AtomicNumber" -> Between[{2, 3}]]

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