HallÃchen! Bernhard Herzog <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Torsten Bronger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> It's interesting to muse about a language that starts at "1" for >> all arrays and strings, as some more or less obsolete languages >> do. I think this is more intuitive, since most people (including >> mathematicians) start counting at "1". The reason for starting >> at "0" is easier memory address calculation, so nothing for >> really high level languages. > > There are very good reasons for half-open intervals and starting > at 0 apart from memory organization. Dijkstra explained this > quite well in > http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF I see only one argument there: "Inclusion of the upper bound would then force the latter to be unnatural by the time the sequence has shrunk to the empty one." While this surely is unaesthetical, I don't think that one should optimise syntax according to this very special case. Besides, no language I know of has probems with negative values. Well, and the argument for "0" derives from that, according to Dijkstra. TschÃ, Torsten. -- Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
