Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on July 17, 2006 08:44 AM
It's a conceit to start counting at zero. It says "I'm in the know, wink, wink, and if you don't know, then you are somehow technologically inferior to me."
Great that it "unified pointer arithmetic and array element access". But the exposure of this in a computer language was a huge mistake leading, if not to numerous subtle errors, at the very least to needless mental offset checking.
The purpose of a language is to make expression natural and intuitive, not to require adaptation to underlying structures. Imagine if your job was to count sheep that enter the pen (supposedly how counting originated). 0, 1, 2, 3,<nobr> <wbr></nobr>,,,, 10. Then you are asked how many sheep are in the pen. Mental gymnastics and doubt start here. Unless 10 now means 11.
To sum up, to start counting real objects starting at 0 is the worst possible way of counting "things". What we have seen in the past 30 years is the orthodoxy of counting from 0. Like all orthodoxies, it must at last fall to common sense.
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Re:Zero...
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on July 17, 2006 08:44 AMGreat that it "unified pointer arithmetic and array element access". But the exposure of this in a computer language was a huge mistake leading, if not to numerous subtle errors, at the very least to needless mental offset checking.
The purpose of a language is to make expression natural and intuitive, not to require adaptation to underlying structures. Imagine if your job was to count sheep that enter the pen (supposedly how counting originated). 0, 1, 2, 3,<nobr> <wbr></nobr>,,,, 10. Then you are asked how many sheep are in the pen. Mental gymnastics and doubt start here. Unless 10 now means 11.
To sum up, to start counting real objects starting at 0 is the worst possible way of counting "things". What we have seen in the past 30 years is the orthodoxy of counting from 0. Like all orthodoxies, it must at last fall to common sense.
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