Re: [ANN] Updated uFAQ (Unofficial Lua FAQ)
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- Subject: Re: [ANN] Updated uFAQ (Unofficial Lua FAQ)
- From: Roberto Ierusalimschy <roberto@...>
- Date: 2011年8月30日 10:57:30 -0300
> Because *people* count from one, not zero.
>
> We do that in kindergarten, in music, when starting a race, when drawing
> up an agenda, everywhere. One, two,three, etc have their counterparts in
> every known language on earth.
>
> Zero, on the other hand, is an advanced concept. Humanity could prove
> that sqrt(2) is not a rational number centuries before anybody thought
> that a symbol for zero might be useful.
>
> A harder question would be "why do arrays in some other languages count
> from zero not one?" The answer for C is a good one: "so that *(A+k) and
> A[k] mean the same". For Python, the answer seems to be "because it's
> that way in C".
I am going to discuss a little about 0-based x 1-based in my talk at the
Lua workshop, and my slides have exactly these arguments!!
| Currently, many languages are 0-based due to influence from C.
| Ironically, none of them share the reason that made C 0-based
| (where a[e] means *(a+e)).
(I also added: "However, several other languages are 0-based without
that influence. Examples include Scheme, Oberon, and Haskell.")
-- Roberto