On Thu 05 Dec, Michael G Schwern wrote: > So here's your essay topic: > > Explain how having indexes (arrays, substr, etc...) in Perl 6 start at 0 > will benefit most users. Do not invoke legacy. [1] > > [1] ie. "because that's how most other languages do it" or "everyone is > used to it by now" are not valid arguments. Ask any Pascal programmer. :)
Many years ago I was involved with a project where all the software people reffered to the hardware as planes 0 and 1 (it was a duplicated system) and the hardware people always used 1 and 2. To avoid confusion we settled on using 0 and 2. Any way of indexing arrays has its proponents. Perl currently has the heavily depreciated $[ to allow playing with this base, changing it has nasty affects at a distance. Long long ago some computer languages did base their arrays at 1 rather than 0. Hopefully they are dead now - it led to confusion and bad practices. But that is a legacy argument. There was an argument when computer languages were close to the hardware, when to index an array you added the index (multiplied by the size of the element) to the base of the array to find what you wanted. This is probably insignificant and not an issue today. To conclude other than a very large legacy argument, there is probably no strong reason to base arrays at 0 rather than 1. I would not want to change. Richard -- Personal [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.waveney.org Telecoms [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.WaveneyConsulting.com Web services [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wavwebs.com Independent Telecomms Specialist, ATM expert, Web Analyst & Services
