In computer related fields zero is used ruthlessly up to a point of
counting pages.
Non-programmer calls his programmer friend and tells him
- I faxed you 10 pages of my recent paper
The other guy starts counting 0,1,...,9 and calls back
- only 9 arrived
This is a joke of course playing the trick of so called "fence post error".
In C/C++ a loop on n is an idiom
for( i = 0; i < n; i++ ) {
.....
}
which fits very well array indexing and pointer arithmetics.
if you see in the code a loop like
for( i = 1; i <= n; i++ ) {
}
then you have to study the code carefully because probably the author had
something special in mind or else he was a fool. Note that from the point
of view of number of iterations both loops are equivalent ("less than n" in
first loop, "less or equal n" in the second).
FORTRAN however used traditionally 1 based indexing.
Happy Year 2000
Slawek
At 06:27 PM 12/28/99 -0200, Fernando Cabral wrote:
>Maybe this is getting too off-topic, but here I go complementing what Mike
says:
>
>In Portuguese we always say (or should say, because computer have changed
>things) "The first of... month name". But we never say "the second", "the
>third", etc.
>So we just jump from ordinal to cardinal for no apparent reason.
>
>We also say "the first hour of the something", but we never say the
"second"...
>
>For popes and kings we always go from "first" to "ninth" but then we go to
>"ten", "eleven", etc.
>
>For children we used to say: "a child in her first year" (that is, before
>her first aniversary). It seems doctors now say the equivalent of
>"0-year old" as opposed to "first year".
>
>The same is true for programming language. Usually COBOL,
>FORTRAN and BASIC (the real thing, created in 1964 at
>the Dartmouth College) do not use zero as an index of a matrix
>or vector. Nevertheless (which is younge4r) C does.
>
>We can survive without using the cipher. But it seems as we get more
>sophisticated people make it a necessity.
>
>- fernando
>
>>
>> So, be careful to call today December 28th - "December the twenty eighth"
>> and not December 28 - "December twenty eight"
>> 28 days will not have elapsed until midnight tonight - at the end of the
>> twenty eighth day of December. As indeed 2000 years will not have
elapsed
>> until midnight at the end of December 31st 2000.
>>
>> Working without a zero isn't all that hard, we do it all the time.
>>
>> Mike
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> 53.37N 3.02W
>> Wirral, UK
>
>--
>Fernando Cabral Padrao iX Sistemas Abertos
>mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pix.com.br
>Fone Direto: +55 61 329-0206 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>PABX: +55 61 329-0202 Fax: +55 61 326-3082
>15º 45' 04.9" S 47º 49' 58.6" W
>19º 37' 57.0" S 45º 17' 13.6" W
>
>
>
