> ... However, the killer reason is: "it's what everybody > else does.
If this were really true, lists would be 1-based. I go back to WATFOR; and Fortran (and I believe Cobol and PL/I, though I'm not positive about them) were 1-based. (Now that I think about it, PL/I, knowing IBM, could probably be set to use either) Back then, everyone else was doing 1-based lists. In my opinion, the reason lists are 0-based started with a lazy programmer who decided that his own comfort (using 0-based addressing at the machine level and not having to translate the high-level 1- based language index into a low-level 0-based index) was paramount over teaching the language and having it make sense in the real world. After all, not even Brian Kernighan thinks books start on page 0. I'm not singling out C in this case because it is a relatively low- level language for low-level programmers and 0-based lists make perfect sense in that context. But then every compiler/interpreter programmer after that stopped caring about it. I smile every time I see the non-nonsensical sentence "The first thing, therefore, is in thing[0]" in a programming language learning book or tutorial. I laugh every time I hear someone defend that as common sense. Every three year old watching Sesame Street knows counting things starts with '1', not '0'. When you were three and you counted your blocks, you started with '1', not '0'. The whole rest of the world understands that implicitly, even if their counting starts '1', '2', 'many'. 0-based lists are NOT common sense. They only make sense to the programmers of computer languages, and their fanbois. There may be loads of reasons for it, but don't throw common sense around as one of them. Den -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
