Logic question

Question

What is the login behind excluding the last element in output of a range or list in python? Like x[0:5] will exclude the last element, here 5th element.

Answer 1

Actually, x[0:5] excludes the 6th element and contains the 5th. Because indexing starts with 0. So this slice contains exactly 5 elements (with indices of 0 to 4).

You'll just have to accept this is how it works. No reason to pry 'why', it was a choice made by the language designers. 😀
Maybe once you start using it in more code, you'll also find it convenient that it is implemented like this.

Answer 2

It makes it easier to concatenate slices, or create contiguous ones:
something[:number] + something[number:] is exactly something.
something[int * step:(int + 1) * step] yields perfectly contiguous slices.
If it didn't exclude the last element, we'd have to subtract 1 for that.