From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2007-07-20T09:10:01+09:00
Subject: Re: The Pebble in the Ruby Shoe

On Mon, 16 Jul 2007 22:22:05 +0900, Raphael Gillett wrote:

> Ruby aims to be a human friendly programming language that embodies the
> principle of least surprise.  However, there is an important feature of
> the language that, despite being a glaring exception to this laudable
> goal, seems to have crept unquestioned into the Ruby core.  It is a
> rebarbative and truly medieval practice which everyone knows causes
> endless confusion, countless unnecessary errors, and a great deal of
> wasted programming time in all languages that incorporate it, e.g., C,
> Java.  In violation of Ruby's ethos, this feature is present purely to
> suit the compiler/interpreter at the expense of the person.
> 
> 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.   Like prisoners who have got used to their chains, the
> Ruby community seems to have meekly accepted this impediment to clear
> thinking.   It is particularly puzzling that Ruby should hobble its
> users in this way, because it is manifestly unnecessary (e.g., Fortran
> and Pascal don't do it).

If you were going to argue for arbitrarily indexed arrays e.g. those 
ranging from 47 thru 300 or from -26 thru 68, you might have a point that 
there's something more natural in your proposal. (Although it would break 
other features of arrays that we hold very dear to our hearts.)

Arguing 1-based arrays to replace 0-based arrays is arbitrary at best, 
and unnatural at worst.

-- 
Ken Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/