Details
Minor Description
Python's built-in range() and xrange() functions can take 1, 2, or 3 arguments. Ranges with just 1 argument are probably used the most frequently, e.g.:
for i in range(len(myList)): ...
However, in pyspark, the SparkContext range() method throws an error when called with a single argument, due to the way its arguments get passed into python's range function.
There's no good reason that I can think of not to support the same syntax as the built-in function. To fix this, we can set the default of the sc.range() method's `stop` argument to None, and then inside the method, if it is None, replace `stop` with `start` and set `start` to 0, which is what the c implementation of range() does:
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Objects/rangeobject.c#L87
