On Saturday, 1 August 2015 at 19:04:10 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
On 8/1/15, DLearner via Digitalmars-d-learn
<digitalmars-d-learn@puremagic.com> wrote:
D is a C derivative, so it seems a shame not to identify causes
of bugs in C,
and design them out in D.
This has already been done! D defines an array to be a struct
with a pointer and a length. See this article:
http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/cs-biggest-mistake/228701625
I would argue it's not "off-by-one" that's causing most issues
when dealing with C "arrays", but instead it's in general
out-of-bounds issues (whether it's off bye one or off by 50..)
since you often don't have the length or could easily use the
wrong variable as the length.
Think about how much D code would actually have subtle
off-by-one errors if D didn't use 0-based indexing like the
majority of popular languages use. Any time you would interface
with other languages you would have to double, triple-check all
your uses of arrays.
FWIW at the very beginning I also found it odd that languages
use 0-based indexing, but that was before I had any significant
programming experience under my belt. By now it's second nature
to me to use 0-based indexing.
But what type of programming are you doing? Even after decades of
programming and trying out dozens of languages, zero-based
indexing still gets me at times when the arrays I work with
represent vectors and matrices. Especially when porting code from
other languages that use one-based indexing. One of the nice
things about D is that it gives you the tools to easily make the
change if you want.
