On 2010-08-13 17:27, Den wrote: > There may be loads of reasons for it, but don't throw common sense > around as one of them. >
It's a good thing then that I didn't: >> ... However, the killer reason is: "it's what everybody >> else does. >> > "Where it all started" is that 0-based indexing gives languages like C a very nice property: a[i] and *(a+i) are equivalent in C. From a language design viewpoint, I think that's quite a strong argument. Languages based directly on C (C++, Objective C, ...) can't break with this for obvious reasons, and other language designers/implementers imitated this behaviour without any good reason to do so, or not to do so. In higher-level languages, it doesn't really matter. 1-based indexing might seam more intuitive, but in the end, it's just another thing you have to learn when learning a language, like "commas make tuples", and somebody studying a programming language learns it, and gets used to it if they aren't used to it already. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
