On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 21:55:30 -0700, Russ P. wrote: > On Aug 18, 7:58 pm, Steven D'Aprano <steve-REMOVE- > t...@cybersource.com.au> wrote: >> On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:47:08 -0700, Russ P. wrote: >> > Is the top team in the league the number 1 team -- or the number 0 >> > team? I have yet to hear anyone call the best team the number 0 team! >> >> Why is the top team the one with the lowest number? > > How could it be otherwise? What is the highest number?
If there are N teams, then the highest number is obviously N (if counting from 1) or N-1 (if from 0). In other words... why do we rank sporting teams Best to Worst rather than the other way around? [...] > Maybe "goofy" was too derogatory, but I think you are rationalizing a > bad decision, at least for high-level languages. I don't think > programming languages should always mimic human languages, but this is > one case where there is no advantage to doing otherwise. > > Why do you think "off by one" errors are so common? Because the darn > indexing convention is off by one! But you have that exactly backwards. Counting from 0 leads to fewer off by one errors for many tasks. (Of course, avoiding indexing in favour of iteration leads to even fewer off by one errors.) Anyway, in a feeble attempt to move this discussion somewhere -- anywhere! -- else: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FencePostError http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyNumberingShouldStartAtZero http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyNumberingShouldStartAtOne http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/zero and of course: http://xkcd.com/163/ -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
