From: John Joyce Date: 2007-07-20T04:36:35+09:00 Subject: Re: The Pebble in the Ruby Shoe On Jul 19, 2007, at 2:19 PM, Steven Lumos wrote: > "Wayne E. Seguin" writes: >> On Jul 18, 2007, at 20:10 , Steven Lumos wrote: >>> No! This is a systematic lie used to defend a convention that was >>> adopted for purely practical reasons. It's like claiming that >>> segmented memory is more natural to mathematicians. Mathematicians >>> and even Computer Scientists consistently use 1, e.g. >>> >> >> I am a (US) Mathematician as are several of my close friends and we >> all use 0 based indexing almost exclusively in our Mathematics work. >> That said I do have to admit we all deal mainly in various branches >> of Mathematical Logic. > > I stand by my claim in spite of a pair of anecdotal reports. Don't > make me survey your papers. :-) (Actually, I can't find many, if any, > publications for either of you. I'm not saying that means anything.) > > Steve > > P.S. If this is you then I suspect we may have mutual acquaintances: > http://www.google.com/patents?hl=en&lr=&vid=USPAT5885158 > > This whole business about 1 or 0 based indexing is not important. It's a moot point. If you want it added to the language, ask at Ruby Core, Matz does read this stuff and does care what users think. But if it doesn't change, don't waste time or electrons complaining and arguing about it. I'd like a lot of languages to change (CSS is one) but if you really want it, make it. That's what Matz did! Larry Wall made Perl, Guido Van Rossum made Python, and that guy who made PHP. Many of the more advanced, more esoteric languages were started as the efforts of a single person.