From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2007-07-19T14:03:40+09:00
Subject: Re: The Pebble in the Ruby Shoe

On Thu, Jul 19, 2007 at 01:43:36PM +0900, Sy Ali wrote:
> On 7/18/07, Phlip <phlipcpp@yahoo.com> wrote:
> >Imagine a language that used 1-based indexing. It would make working in
> >0-based appallingly hard even for simple situations. So we would prefer 
> >this
> >slippery slope to slide in the correct direction.
> 
> I'm a very young programmer, and I've known about this 0 vs 1 issue
> for a while now.  Phlip's comment above is very good at explaining the
> reason behind it, but I've had a hard time truly grasping it.
> 
> Is anyone willing to show some snippets of Ruby code which could
> demonstrate the challenge of working with 1-based arrays?  There were
> some snippets in previous messages but they were too partial for me to
> really understand things..

  > irb
  irb(main):001:0> foo = %w[zero one two three]
  => ["zero", "one", "two", "three"]
  irb(main):002:0> puts "last element: #{foo[-1]}"
  last element: three
  => nil

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
John Kenneth Galbraith: "If all else fails, immortality can always be
assured through spectacular error."