Why are String offsets so complicated?

[nick.keets]

This comes up about once every 6 months. Here are some previous discussions:

Shorthand for Offsetting startIndex and endIndex

Hello, Swift-Evolution Using collection indexes are a bit of a bother when you want to do simple slicing and a type is not indexed by Int. For a simple example take the code here: let s = "Hello, Swift" let m = s[...s.index(s.startIndex, offsetBy: 4)] The intent of advancing startIndex gets a bit muddled. So to ease this I think we could add startIndex(offsetBy:) and endIndex(offsetBy:) to Collection . Making the example above: let s = "Hello, Swift" let m = s[...s.startIndex(offsetBy: 4)…

String slicing ergonomics

I simply want to reopen the discussion about why this: string[string.startIndex..<string.index(string.startIndex, offsetBy: 15)] Cannot be simply this: string[0..<15] Or even better: string[..<15] After years of using Swift I continue to have to search how to slice a string each time. It's extremely cumbersome and user-hostile.