Lada Kugis schrieb:
On 01 Apr 2009 01:26:41 GMT, Steven D'Aprano
<ste...@remove.this.cybersource.com.au> wrote:
Why Python (and other languages) count from zero instead of one, and
why half-open intervals are better than closed intervals:
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/06/26/why-computer-scientists-count-from-zero/
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html
steven, thanks for answering,
yes, i saw the second one a little time ago (someone else posted it as
well in really cute handwriting version :) and the first time just
now, but the examples which both of them give don't seem to me to be
that relevant, e.g. the pros don't overcome the cons.
imho, although both sides (mathematical vs engineer) adress some
points, none of them give the final decisive argument.
i understand the math. point of view, but from the practical side it
is not good. it goes nicely into his tidy theory of everything, but
practical and intuitive it is not.
You keep throwing around the concept of "intuition" as if it were
something that existis in a globally fixed frame of reference. It is not.
From [1]:
"""
Klein found that under time pressure, high stakes, and changing
parameters, experts used their base of experience to identify similar
situations and intuitively choose feasible solutions.
"""
In other words: your gained *knowledge* (including mathematical
know-how) determines what's intuitive - to *you*.
So all arguing about intuition is rather irrelevant - to me, zero-based
counting is intuitive, and it is so with the same right as you prefer
one-based.
OTOH zero-based counting has technical reasons that also reduces the
amount of leaky abstraction problems [2], as it models the underlying
reality of memory locations + indexing.
Diez
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_(knowledge)
[2] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html
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