From: William James <w_a_x_man@...>
Date: 2007-07-19T05:10:02+09:00
Subject: Re: The Pebble in the Ruby Shoe

On Jul 16, 8:22 am, Raphael Gillett <r.gill...@rational.demon.co.uk>
wrote:

> 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.

You're saying that it is self-evident that indexing
should start at 1.  Remember the definition of "self-evident":

self-evident, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else.

Let's say you're programming in a low-level language.
If A is the address of an array, and S is the size
in bytes of an element, what's the address of the
Nth element?

If indexing is 0-based:
A + N*S

If indexing is 1-based:
A + (N-1)*S

Can you tell which is simpler?