Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Fortran ... Basic ... actually I'd have thought that zero was a > minority position. Fashions change I guess.
When I started programming the top four languages for business programming were COBOL, BASIC, RPG II, and assembly language. (Pascal and C came later, and I never saw much use of Fortran by anyone other than mathematicians.) Except for assembly language, the subscripts for arrays either started with 1 always, or that was the default. Given when it was first developed, it's not too surprising that the SQL standard adopted 1 as the first element of an array. Which is more natural depends on whether you think of the subscript in terms of ordinal positions or offsets from the base address. -- Kevin Grittner EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
