Sebastiano Vigna wrote:
One-indexing is brain damaged. See EWD831:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html
Ciao,
I've read it, and while interesting, it doesn't bear much on the
issue. It's obfuscatory rather than explicative. I've also done the
counting starting with 0, but only tongue-in-cheek--you can look around
and see who the other geeks are by who's grinning instead of looking
puzzled, annoyed, or angry. Counting counts how many there are, and
the first one is 1. Indexing denotes a displacement
into a list and starts with 0. Both are quite natural, but it doesn't
make sense to say that counting should start from 0 because 0 is a more
natural first index. And that's what the article says. I love
Dijkstra, but after all, he is one of us geeks, so of course he
would have fun whipping this out and posting it. <grin;>. That
doesn't make counting from 0 a good communication skill:)
Patrick
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