From: "John W. Kennedy" <jwkenne@...>
Date: 2007-07-19T10:44:59+09:00
Subject: Re: The Pebble in the Ruby Shoe

Michael P. Soulier wrote:
> On 19/07/07 John M. Gamble said:
> 
>>> Actually, if Ruby had been implemented in Fortran or Pascal, then most
>>> certainly arrays would have begun indexing with 1 instead of 0.
>> Well, if one were to blindly follow one's predecessors, yes - at least
>> with Fortran.  Pascal lets you determine the array range, so you could
>> have the option of starting with zero.  And indeed, when we first
>> encountered that possibility, zero got used a lot.
> 
> I believe that Fortran also prevents recursion. Perhaps we should dump that
> silly feature of Ruby too. ;-)

Historic FORTRAN was developed on hardware that made the use of arrays 
in automatic story prohibitively expensive, so all historic FORTRAN 
variables were static. Ergo, no recursion. But I know that automatic 
variables came in in Fortran 77, and I'm pretty sure that recursion is 
allowed now.

-- 
John W. Kennedy
"...if you had to fall in love with someone who was evil, I can see why 
it was her."
   -- "Alias"