Re:
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- Subject: Re:
- From: Duck <duck@...>
- Date: 2007年10月29日 11:41:51 +1100 (EST)
I don't care whether you buy them. For
many, me included, they are more natural.
Which "elevator (lift) nomenclature" do you prefer? American or European?
I prefer the Eurostyle, where there's a special name for the floor of a
building which is at street level (ground floor, erdgeschoss,
rez-de-chaussee), and where you have to go up one floor to get to the
first floor of the building (self-contradictory though that sounds when
you say it).
OTOH, I can't argue with the logic of the American system, where the first
floor of a building (at street level) is called 1, the second called 2,
and so forth, but it takes a couple of days in North America (or Japan) to
remember that when the elevator signals "1," it's time to get out. If you
wait for the next floor, you'll find yourself whisked back up :-)
Of course, the European system is slightly more natural when a building
has basement floors, which can be numbered negatively without creating a
"gap" at street level. (What I think of as the BC/AD issue. Should there
be a 0AD? Or, for that matter, a BC0?)
I still maintain that the problem around nils in tables is more
fundamental that the basedness of arrays, since it is a sort of
singularity.
Zero-based and one-based arrays are equivalent and can be unambiguously
mapped from one to another (IIRC the cardinalities of the natural numbers
and of the non-negative integers are the same). The off-by-one problems
exist in equal measure in both systems, as an unavoidable consequence of
the fencepost principle (Wednesday is two days after Monday. But if you
take vacation from Monday to Wednesday, it costs you three days' leave.
Doesn't matter whether you consider the week starts on Sunday or on
Monday, or at day zero or one.)
'Strong-nilled' tables and 'weak-nilled' tables simply can't robustly be
mapped from one to another other than in the internals of the language
runtime, IMO. So a language feature to select at run-time whether a table
should operate strongly or weakly with respect to nils would surely bury
this perennial point of contention eternally, to the satisfaction of all
parties.
Not that I feel strongly about it :-)