nolta/julia — comment on commit 133a9f655f336f1c21b1388f6f5431d2f4e37314
File:  line 0
By StefanKarpinski:

Oh, right. I see what's happening here. `:4` is actually the expression `4` quoted — which evaluates to just `4` since its a literal. We decided to use the `:` prefix for symbols and expressions (like Ruby). The cost of that decision was to not allow things like `:b` as slice expressions. You have to do `s[1:4]` instead. However, this is obviously ripe for confusion and it would be nice if we could provide a warning here. We adopted the colon range notation entire from Matlab, so I think changing it at this point would be really weird :-/