From: Adrian Howard <adrianh@...>
Date: 2007-07-17T22:43:35+09:00
Subject: Re: The Pebble in the Ruby Shoe


On 17 Jul 2007, at 14:27, James Edward Gray II wrote:

> On Jul 17, 2007, at 7:58 AM, Adrian Howard wrote:
>
>>
>> On 16 Jul 2007, at 19:22, Lloyd Linklater wrote:
>>
>>> Tim Pease wrote:
>>>> Actually, if Ruby had been implemented in Fortran or Pascal,  
>>>> then most
>>>> certainly arrays would have begun indexing with 1 instead of 0.
>>>
>>> Ok, I know that this is not a Ruby point, but I feel compelled to
>>> respond.  The basic array in Pascal is zero based.
>> [snip]
>>
>> Fortran doesn't care much either. There's a convention for  
>> starting at 1, but the language allows you to specify an arbitrary  
>> index range for your arrays.
>
> Perl copied that misfeature, though it defaults to zero, in the  
> hopes of attracting Fortran programmers.

Perl's misfeature is pretty different - it's a global rather than a  
per-array thing. Being able to say "this particular array has indices  
-10 -> 10 is considerably more useful than saying "every array starts  
at -10" :-)

>   What they learned was that it breaks way too much.  I'm pretty  
> sure it's being removed in Perl 6.

It is. Everybody admits it was a bad idea.

Adrian