[SPARK-7150] SparkContext.range() and SQLContext.range()

This PR is based on #6081, thanks adrian-wang.

Closes #6081

Author: Daoyuan Wang <daoyuan.wang@intel.com>
Author: Davies Liu <davies@databricks.com>

Closes #6230 from davies/range and squashes the following commits:

d3ce5fe [Davies Liu] add tests
789eda5 [Davies Liu] add range() in Python
4590208 [Davies Liu] Merge commit 'refs/pull/6081/head' of github.com:apache/spark into range
cbf5200 [Daoyuan Wang] let's add python support in a separate PR
f45e3b2 [Daoyuan Wang] remove redundant toLong
617da76 [Daoyuan Wang] fix safe marge for corner cases
867c417 [Daoyuan Wang] fix
13dbe84 [Daoyuan Wang] update
bd998ba [Daoyuan Wang] update comments
d3a0c1b [Daoyuan Wang] add range api()

1 files changed, 16 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/python/pyspark/context.py b/python/pyspark/context.py
index d25ee85523..1f2b40b29f 100644
--- a/python/pyspark/context.py
+++ b/python/pyspark/context.py
@@ -319,6 +319,22 @@ class SparkContext(object):
         with SparkContext._lock:
             SparkContext._active_spark_context = None
 
+    def range(self, start, end, step=1, numSlices=None):
+        """
+        Create a new RDD of int containing elements from `start` to `end`
+        (exclusive), increased by `step` every element.
+
+        :param start: the start value
+        :param end: the end value (exclusive)
+        :param step: the incremental step (default: 1)
+        :param numSlices: the number of partitions of the new RDD
+        :return: An RDD of int
+
+        >>> sc.range(1, 7, 2).collect()
+        [1, 3, 5]
+        """
+        return self.parallelize(xrange(start, end, step), numSlices)
+
     def parallelize(self, c, numSlices=None):
         """
         Distribute a local Python collection to form an RDD. Using xrange