From: Frank Church <voipfc@...>
Date: 2007-07-17T14:58:11+09:00
Subject: Re: The Pebble in the Ruby Shoe

On 16/07/07, Raphael Gillett <r.gillett@rational.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> Ruby aims to be a human friendly programming language that embodies the
> principle of least surprise.  However, there is an important feature of
> the language that, despite being a glaring exception to this laudable
> goal, seems to have crept unquestioned into the Ruby core.  It is a
> rebarbative and truly medieval practice which everyone knows causes
> endless confusion, countless unnecessary errors, and a great deal of
> wasted programming time in all languages that incorporate it, e.g., C,
> Java.  In violation of Ruby's ethos, this feature is present purely to
> suit the compiler/interpreter at the expense of the person.
>
> The pebble in the Ruby shoe is the counter-intuitive use of indexing of
> elements of arrays, strings, etc., from 0 to n-1 instead of the more
> natural 1 to n.   Like prisoners who have got used to their chains, the
> Ruby community seems to have meekly accepted this impediment to clear
> thinking.   It is particularly puzzling that Ruby should hobble its
> users in this way, because it is manifestly unnecessary (e.g., Fortran
> and Pascal don't do it).
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
>
>

Is this some kind of troll?

My own experience with programming makes me feel that counting arrays
from 0 is the natural thing. If you are handling an array  5 items
starting from x, going from x+0 to x+4 is more concise than going from
x+1-1 to x+5-1. There are other examples in which I have found it
convenient.

Chinese count birthdays starting with the child's first year as year
1. As a westerner do you consider it natural describe a child as 2
years old on its "first" birthday?

It may be counterintuitive but in the mathematical world it is quite natural.