On 2/6/07, Smylers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Blair Sutton writes: > David Green wrote: > > > In some ways, I like not having a [0] index at all: programmers may > > be used to counting from zero, but normal humans start with first, > > second, third, ... third last, second last,... > > My feelings are Perl 6 should stick to 0 being the index of the first > element of a list. Otherwise we might alienate programmers from P5 and > nearly every other language. Couldn't the first array index be > adjusted by adding a user defined Parrot grammar definition that > applies the transformation +1 inside [] operators instead; maybe this > could be accessible via a Perl "use" pragma. Hmmm, a pragma's a bit heavyweight for this; how about being able to set this with a special global variable -- that sure sounds handy ...
I can't quite tell how serious you are :-) I can't see Perl 6 changing the default starting index of arrays to be anything other than 0 because that meme is so pervasive (look at where substr() starts, and how we now have $0, etc.). But I can see the need for a pragma to help out the Pascal or Fortran programmers start all of their arrays at something other than 0. And I can see the need for a modifier so that an individual array can start at an index other that 0. just registering my tuppence, -Scott -- Jonathan Scott Duff [EMAIL PROTECTED]
