Many languages offer a feature that lets you take a substring by indices real quick. It is handy. Here is an example from JavaScript:
> "Hello World".slice (6, 11)
'World'
One frequent use case is when you have a parse tree annotated with locations and you want to recover the literal source of a given syntactic element. With slice, this is done at once.
Can we add such a function to text? Maybe it can have a more efficient implementation than take … . drop …?