A downside of 1..10 is, how do you represent an empty range starting from 1? 1..0? That looks so weird... I'd expect it to mean a backward range starting from 1

A downside of 1..10 is, how do you represent an empty range starting from 1? 1..0? That looks so weird... I'd expect it to mean a backward range starting from 1 and going up to 0 inclusive. A nice thing about end-exclusive notation is you can denote backward ranges, forward ranges, and empty ranges with the same notation.