From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-07-19T11:44:40+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. ;-)
> 
> Mike

Well ... they *are* talking seriously about dumping Call/CC. How many
Ruby programmers, or, for that matter, C programmers, actually use
recursion, even tail recursion? Recursion has been mainstream in
programming languages since Algol 60, but how many people actually use
it outside of Lisp/Scheme and other functional languages?