# One-sided ranges in array indexes

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/one-sided-ranges-in-array-indexes/45336>\
**Category:** Internals & Design\
**Tags:** indexing, array\
**Created:** [August 21, 2020, 8:27pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/one-sided-ranges-in-array-indexes/45336 "2020-08-21T20:27:29Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 8

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**Author:** ![simeonschaub](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/simeonschaub/32/216566_2.png) [@simeonschaub](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/simeonschaub)\
**Post date:** [August 21, 2020, 9:13pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/one-sided-ranges-in-array-indexes/45336/8 "2020-08-21T21:13:15Z")

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That’s just not how Julia’s parser works. Whether something is a symbol or a range expression needs to be decided at parse time, where no information about types is available. This would also be fairly fragile — an example where this breaks down is DataFrames.jl, where DataFrames can be indexed with symbols as well as ranges. I would also suggest reading [this post by Stefan](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/psa-julia-is-not-at-that-stage-of-development-anymore/44872/4), since this behavior is now fairly established in Julia and found to work quite well, so it is very unlikely this is going to change.

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