From: Robert Dober <robert.dober@...>
Date: 2007-07-17T15:10:15+09:00
Subject: Re: The Pebble in the Ruby Shoe

On 7/17/07, Frank Church <voipfc@googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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?
Possibly, however...
>
> 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.
So is mine, but here eventually ;) my Ada background comes in handy,
we are used to declaring our own bounderies.
I believe that all is habit, but being used to 0 makes life easier I believe.
We could also argue about the values #times is yielding, right;)
>
> 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?
You see, all habit, and it shows some intellectual short sight to
dismiss ideas foreign to our paradigm -- that's why I am doing it all
the time ;).
>
> It may be counterintuitive but in the mathematical world it is quite natural.
Or maybe common would be a better world;
In Austria where I went to school 0 is not a positive number. In
France I am constantly confronted with the notation that a whole
number is either positive or negative defining 0 of being part of the
former, drives me crazy, but makes lots of texts much shorter -- they
seem never to use natural number for positive including 0.

But maybe some learned francophone mathematician can mail me off list,
I am only working with engineers, natural as an engineer, you know ;)

Cheers
Robert
>
>


-- 
I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java.
I just didn't know it would be called Ruby
-- Kent Beck