Torsten Bronger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF > > I see only one argument there: "Inclusion of the upper bound would > then force the latter to be unnatural by the time the sequence has > shrunk to the empty one." While this surely is unaesthetical, I > don't think that one should optimise syntax according to this very > special case.
The other main argument for startig at 0 is that if you do not include the upper bound and start at 1 then the indices i of a sequence of N values are 1 <= i < N + 1 which is not as nice as 0 <= i < N. opportunity for an off by one error. Then there's also that, starting at 0, "an element's ordinal (subscript) equals the number of elements preceding it in the sequence." Bernhard -- Intevation GmbH http://intevation.de/ Skencil http://skencil.org/ Thuban http://thuban.intevation.org/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
