On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 5:48 PM, Lada Kugis <lada.ku...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:42:20 +1100, Ben Finney > <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > >>Lada Kugis <lada.ku...@gmail.com> writes: >> >>> in python for example: >>> for i in range(1,n) >>> goes from 1,2,3,4,...,n-1 >>> (that is, it goes from 1 up to, but not including n) >> >>Also, ?range(n)? counts from 0 to n-1. >> >>> Why is that so ? >> >>The answer is in the documentation for ?range?: >> >> For example, range(4) returns [0, 1, 2, 3]. The end point is >> omitted! These are exactly the valid indices for a list of 4 >> elements. > > Yes, but why didn't they start indexing from 1 then, like fortran for > example ? > It would solve for [1,2,3,4] length of list (just returns the last > indice, in this case 4), "up to and including" problem, ...
Might I suggest you read Dijkstra's famous justification for 0-numbering: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF Among other things, it has the nice property that: len(some_list[n:m]) == m-n Cheers, Chris -- I have a blog: http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
