Shortcut for Range[]?

Question

I use Range a lot. Is there any syntactic shortcut for it, or do you always have to spell it out?

Answer 1

If you want a nicer layout for Range you could try the Notation package:

Notation is a bit picky about the definition code of your notation. It has to go manually via its templates. That's why I used a picture above. The following code should work when copied:

<< Notation`

CellPrint@Cell[BoxData[
    RowBox[{"InfixNotation", "[", 
       RowBox[{
          TemplateBox[{"\[TripleDot]"},
            "NotationTemplateTag"], ",", "Range"}], "]"}]], "Input"]

After executing those two lines, a third one will appear which must be executed as well. After that you can use the \[TripleDot] character to define ranges:

5 \[TripleDot] 9

{5, 6, 7, 8, 9}

If you just want shorter code you can define:

r = Range;
r@5
r[3, 9, 2]

{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}

{3, 5, 7, 9}

Answer 2

The reference page for gives variations which utilize default arguments:

Range[20]
Range[1,20]
Range[1,20,1]

An alternative for this usage is Array

Array[#&,20]

If you are after a list of numbers, you could use Table

Range[6,20,2]
Table[i,{i,6,20,2}]

But if you are just using the output of Range as indices for Part then you might want to look at Span

f[[Range[6,20,2]]]
f[[6;;20;;2]]

Answer 3

On my laptop I can get the symbol "®" with "Alt-r". So the following code using the infix notation (see Infix) is very similar to the answer of Sjoerd C. de Vries, but much easier to set-up.

In[77]:= ® = Range;

In[78]:= 4~®~7
Out[78]= {4, 5, 6, 7}

In[79]:= Range[4, 7]
Out[79]= {4, 5, 6, 7}

In[80]:= 4~Range~7
Out[80]= {4, 5, 6, 7}