"Dan Bishop" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Name a problem space that inherently requires arrays to be 1-based > rather than 0-based.
"inherently" is too strong a word, since after all, we could do all our computing with Turing machines. Some algorithms are specified in terms of 1-based arrays. And most Fortran programs are written in terms of 1-based arrays. So if you want to implement a 1-based specification in Python, or write Python code that interoperates with Fortran code, you either need 1-based arrays in Python or else you need messy conversions all over your Python code. The book "Numerical Recipes in C" contains a lot of numerical subroutines written in C, loosely based on Fortran counterparts from the original Numerical Recipes book. The C routines are full of messy conversions from 0-based to 1-based. Ugh. Again, this (along with nested scopes and various other things) was all figured out by the Algol-60 designers almost 50 years ago. In Algol-60 you could just say "integer x(3..20)" and get a 3-based array (I may have the syntax slightly wrong by now). It was useful and took care of this problem. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
