Data ranged subscribe strange behavior - swift

Question

I was playing with swift's Data in the following a small code:
var d = Data(count: 10)
d[5] = 3
let d2 = d[5..<8]
print("\(d2[0])")
To my surprise, this code throws exception on print() while the following code does not:
var d = Data(count: 10)
d[5] = 3
let d2 = d.subdata(in: 5..<8)
print("\(d2[0])")
I somehow understand why this happens, but I don't get why this is designed like this. When I use subdata() I get a whole copy of range, so indexing is valid from 0. But when I use range subscribe [], I get access to the requested range while indexing is the same as before. So in my first example d2[5] is 3.
But I wonder why it is designed like this? I don't want to make a copy of my data by using subdata() method. I just wanted to access a portion of my data with better indexing.
This is especially creates unexpected behaviors if you pass it to a function. For example, following code creates unexpected results and exceptions and you may not find out easily why:
func testit(idata: Data) {
if idata.count > 0 {
print("\(idata.count)")
print("\(idata[0])")
}
}
//...
var d = Data(count: 10)
d[5] = 3
let d2 = d[5..<8]
testit(idata: d2)
This code is really strange. Because if you debug your code, you see that print("\(idata.count)") prints 3 as size of idata which is correct, but accessing it with idata[0] creates exception.
Is there any reason for this design? I was expecting that I could access resulting Data from subscribe starting index 0 while it is not true. Can I do this without using subdata() which creates copy of data or using additional arguments to pass base of data slice?

Answer 1

d[5..<8] returns Data.Slice – which happens to be Data. Generally, slices share the indices with their base collection, as documented in Slice.
One possible reason for this design decision is that it guarantees that subscripting a slice is a O(1) operation (adding an offset for accessing the base collection is not necessarily O(1), e.g. not for strings.)
It is also convenient, as in this example to locate the text after the second occurrence of a character in a string:
let string = "abcdefgabcdefg"
// Find first occurrence of "d":
if let r1 = string.range(of: "d") {
// Find second occurrence of "d":
if let r2 = string[r1.upperBound...].range(of: "d") {
print(string[r2.upperBound...]) // efg
}
}
As a consequence, you must never assume that the indices of a collection are zero-based (unless documented, as for Array.startIndex). Use startIndex to get the first index, or first to get the first element.