# Non-friendly documentation

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/non-friendly-documentation/38109>\
**Category:** New to Julia\
**Tags:** question, documentation\
**Created:** [April 23, 2020, 9:24pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/non-friendly-documentation/38109 "2020-04-23T21:24:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 49

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**Author:** ![rjmoses](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/90db22/32.png) [@rjmoses](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/rjmoses)\
**Post date:** [April 26, 2020, 1:34pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/non-friendly-documentation/38109/49 "2020-04-26T13:34:50Z")

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After more digging and investigating, I would have say that the Julia documentation is lacking in complete definitions and examples.

Specifically, I tripped across a statement in the split function that read “if r != 0:-1 …”. I have spent about 3 hours trying to find a reference that explains the “0:-1”. I have tried testing it in REPL, but it always seems to come back true.

Looking in the Punctuation section, it defines “a:b” as a binary infix operator to construct a range of a to b which make sense to me.

But where I get tripped up is the 0:-1! What does this mean?

If it means a range of 0 to -1, how does -1 play into to this? Otherwise what does it mean?

I am not looking for an answer here, just pointing out a newbie’s learning frustration at the missing documentation. (BTW: I am not a newbie to software: 50+ years, 30+ languages, 8 OS’es, systems, applications, communications programming, etc.)

IMO, good, thorough documentation makes everyone’s job easier.

And I, like many others, don’t like to do documentation.

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