From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-07-18T00:19:20+09:00
Subject: Re: The Pebble in the Ruby Shoe

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.
> 
> Adrian
> 
> 
FORTRAN wasn't always that way. The ability to index arrays starting at
some value other than one came fairly late in the language -- at least
FORTRAN I, II and IV only started at 1. Does anyone here remember what
it was in Algol 60? It must have been 0, since most languages that don't
allow an arbitrary starting index are descended from Algol 60 and use 0.

I should go look that up. :)