Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!att-ih!pacbell!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!rochester!PT.CS.CMU.EDU!andrew.cmu.edu!jk3k+ From: jk3k+@andrew.cmu.edu (Joe Keane) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: 0-based/1-based arrays Message-ID: Date: 1 Apr 88 04:15:32 GMT References: <7161@sol.ARPA> <2740@mmintl.UUCP> <4343@june.cs.washington.edu> <6276@ames.arpa>, <1915@mips.mips.COM> Organization: Carnegie Mellon University Lines: 20 In-Reply-To: <1915@mips.mips.COM> In article <1915@mips.mips.COM>, uday@mips.COM (Robert Redford) writes: > When someone has zero apples, it means that he has no > apples. If there are three apples on the table, one would start > refering to them as first apple, second apple, third apple. > If there are 3 memory cells in the computer, one starts refering > to them as zeroth memory cell, first memory cell and second memory > cell. The problem with this is that most people agree that memory cell 0 is the `first' one. But then we get the same off-by-one stupidity we have with centuries, that memory cell 100 would be the `hundred-and-first' one. So we need to insert another ordinal. Etymologically, it should go: `first', `second', `twoth', `third', ... (I'd like to hear something better than `twoth'.) The French don't even need a new word: `premier', `second', `deuxieme', `troisieme', ... But what do i know, i also think we should use hexadecimal... --Joe