I hold the book "Proofs from THE BOOK"
(Aigner and Ziegler) in my hands and on the first
page of Chapter 1 it says "For any finite set
{p1,...,pr} of primes ...".
I was once responsible for recording the lecture
notes for a class by Stephen Cook. I changed
one proof to use 0-origin instead of 1-origin,
making it "more elegant". (I was young and foolish.)
Cook didn't say anything, but I don't think he
appreciated the change.
In Ken's "Notation as a Tool of Thought"
http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm
Turing lecture, many expressions would be
simplified if he had used index origin 0
instead of the 1 that he did use. (And
further simplified if he had available the
monad # .)
----- Original Message -----
From: Zsbán Ambrus <[email protected]>
Date: Sunday, July 25, 2010 8:26
Subject: Re: [Jprogramming] index origin 0
To: Programming forum <[email protected]>
> On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 3:16 PM, Roger Hui <[email protected]> wrote:
> > does the choice of a fixed value of 0 for index origin a
> > hindrance to your work?
>
> I am disqualified from the survey, and I find zero based
> indexing much
> more convenient that one based indexing. I believe that
> zero based
> indexing is used in the language the proofs in the Book are written.
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