From: Peter Cooper <peter@...>
Date: 2007-07-17T18:37:53+09:00
Subject: Re: The Pebble in the Ruby Shoe

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On 7/17/07, Frank Church <voipfc@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.


It depends how you look at arrays. If you think of each element as, well..
an "element" then the argument for 1 based arrays is supported by how things
work in real life. For example, you would consider the first year of a
child's existence to be "year 1". Year 1 is "the year" (that is, the
"element") between birth and the age of 1.

If you split things into boxes, which, arguably, is what an array is, then
starting from 1 actually makes sense. A line of boxes is not inherently
0-based. You have boxes 1, 2, 3, and so forth.. but no-one says the first
element of a collection of natural items is "item 0."

I don't see the original post as a troll at all other than in its
implication that Ruby is a "human friendly" programming language. It might
be "human friendly" but that human is a computer programmer.. If Ruby was
meant to be novice friendly, then sure, 1-based indexing makes sense. Of
course, I quite like 0-based indexing, though I recognize it doesn't really
make much sense in layman's terms.. but most of computer science doesn't.

Cheers,
Peter Cooper
http://www.petercooper.co.uk/

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