Language Envy - C# needs Ranges

As soon as I started learning Ruby, a few years ago, I got immediately hooked on its Range class. I could not believe I had been programming in .NET without them for so long.

I like to think of range objects as the specification for a for loop, packaged in an object that can be passed around. That's not the whole story, though. Ranges also represent sequences or intervals, which can be queried for intersection or containment. See the following Ruby sample code.

#declare a Range object
summer_months = 6..9
#enumerate it
summer_months.each {|m| puts "#{Date.new(2000, m, 1).strftime('%B')} is a Summer month." }
#other handy features
summer_months.include? 7 # ==> true
summer_months.to_a # ==> [6, 7, 8, 9]  (converted to array)

I needed that in C#

That was back when the CLR 2.0 was just about to be released and I ended up writing my own Range