From: "John W. Kennedy" <jwkenne@...>
Date: 2007-07-19T02:10:08+09:00
Subject: Re: The Pebble in the Ruby Shoe

kevin cline wrote:
> On Jul 16, 8:22 am, Raphael Gillett <r.gill...@rational.demon.co.uk>
> wrote:
>> Ruby aims to be a human friendly programming language that embodies the
>> principle of least surprise...
> 
>> 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.
> 
> With 50+ years of collective experience, it seems clear that zero-
> based arrays lead to the simplest code.

...unless there is a lot of exposure of nominal index values to the end 
user, in which case the additional effort of doing that may incur more 
complexity than is saved by using 0-origin internally.
-- 
John W. Kennedy
"The bright critics assembled in this volume will doubtless show, in 
their sophisticated and ingenious new ways, that, just as /Pooh/ is 
suffused with humanism, our humanism itself, at this late date, has 
become full of /Pooh./"
   -- Frederick Crews.  "Postmodern Pooh", Preface