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Alphabet

Status: Stable

documented, exercised by the test suite and/or worked examples, with no known limitations recorded.

Description

Alphabet[]

Gives the list of the lowercase letters a through z.

Examples (9)

Every input below was run against the current Mathilda build and its output recorded.

Basic examples (3)

In[1]:= CharacterRange["a", "e"]
Out[1]= {"a", "b", "c", "d", "e"}

In[2]:= CharacterRange[65, 70]
Out[2]= {"A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F"}

In[3]:= Length[Alphabet[]]
Out[3]= 26

Applications (6)

In[4]:= Alphabet[]
Out[4]= {"a", "b", "c", "d", "e", "f", "g", "h", "i", "j", "k", "l", "m", "n", "o", "p", "q", "r", "s", "t", "u", "v", "w", "x", "y", "z"}

In[5]:= Length[Alphabet[]]
Out[5]= 26

In[6]:= StringJoin[ToUpperCase[Alphabet[]]]
Out[6]= "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"

The alphabet index of a letter

In[7]:= Position[Alphabet[], "m"]
Out[7]= {{13}}

In[8]:= Alphabet[] === CharacterRange["a", "z"]
Out[8]= True

Language arguments are not implemented: unevaluated

In[9]:= Alphabet["Greek"]
Out[9]= Alphabet["Greek"]

Implementation notes

Algorithm. builtin_alphabet accepts only the zero-argument call and returns char_list('a', 'z') ā€” the same helper as CharacterRange, which encodes each code point 0x61ā€“0x7A as a one-character String. Any argument (a language name, a type spec) makes it return NULL, so the call stays unevaluated.

Data structures. A fresh 26-element List of one-character strings on every call.

Complexity / limits. Constant time. Mathematica's language-specific forms (Alphabet["Greek"], Alphabet[lang, type]) and the language-data they rely on are not implemented.

Attributes: Protected.

References

See also: CharacterRange

Notes & additional examples

Notes

  • Only the zero-argument form is implemented: the 26 lowercase English letters, built by the same code path as CharacterRange["a", "z"].
  • Mathematica's Alphabet["language"] and Alphabet[spec, type] forms are not supported and stay unevaluated.
  • Attributes {Protected}.
  • See also: CharacterRange, LetterQ.