From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2007-07-19T05:23:48+09:00
Subject: Re: The Pebble in the Ruby Shoe

On Thu, Jul 19, 2007 at 02:10:08AM +0900, John W. Kennedy wrote:
> 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.

Not always true.  Think of voting systems, such as on reddit, where the
positive value of something is the sum of all the increment-votes and
decrement-votes assigned to it.  The index value in a zero-based array
would be exactly what you'd want to expose to the end-user in such a
circumstance.  Of course, such systems aren't always (or even usually,
perhaps) managed with an array -- but when you're trying to keep track of
who up- or down-voted something, as well as how many votes it got, an
array starts to look more interesting.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Dr. Ron Paul: "Liberty has meaning only if we still believe in it when
terrible things happen and a false government security blanket beckons."