python for loop

Dave Angel davea at ieee.org
Wed Apr 1 07:06:27 EDT 2009


Natural language is full of ambiguity, which is why my parents used to 
argue about the meaning of "next Wednesday,"  or of "the next exit."  
Until you have a starting reference, and until you decide whether it's a 
closed or open interval, you can't be sure everyone will get the same 
semantics.  Because of their bickering 50 years ago, I try to use a 
longer phrase, such as "the Wednesday a week from today" or "exit 52."

In most? of Europe, the first floor is the one you get to after you go 
up one flight of stairs.  In the US, first floor is usually the ground 
floor.

My ruler starts at zero, and has an explicit zero on it.  Most rulers 
start the same way, but don't actually show the zero.  But if you had a 
ruler that started with one, you'd end up with some off-by-one errors.

I repeatedly see people think that if Joe has $100, and Mary has three 
times more, that she has $300.  Yet these same people would balk at the 
notion that 10% more would be $10.

English is a funny language (as I suspect most languages are), and full 
of ambiguities and foolish inconsistencies.  Having worked with some 35 
languages over 35 years in the industry, I was glad that most of them 
were zero based.

Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:39:26 +0100, Rhodri James wrote:
>
>   
>> Dragging this back to the original topic, you clearly find starting list
>> indices from zero unintuitive.  To me, with a mathematical background,
>> it's not just intuitive, it's correct.  All sorts of useful properties
>> fall out from that, not the least of which is the fact that
>> "a[0:len(a)]" slices the whole of a list.
>>     
>
> But some non-useful properties fall out of that too.
>
> Want the fifth item? a[5] gives you the *sixth* item, which is weird, so 
> you have to use a[5-1] to get the fifth item.
>
> There is a major clash between the names of ordinals in human languages 
> and zero-based counting. In human languages, the Nth-ordinal item comes 
> in position N. You can keep that useful convention with zero-based 
> counting by inventing the ugly word "zeroth", but that just leads to 
> bizarro-talk like "the zeroeth item comes first, the first item comes 
> second, and so on".
>
> a[0:len(a)] is legal, a[0] is legal, but surprisingly a[len(a)] is an 
> error.
>
> Despite coming from a Pascal background, I've come to appreciate and 
> prefer zero-based indexing for programming. But I'm not blind to the 
> disadvantages. I'll often work out an algorithm using pencil and paper 
> and counting from one, and then subtract one to get zero-based indexes.
>
> There are advantages and disadvantages to both systems, but on balance, I 
> think that zero-based is a better system for programming, and one-based 
> for natural language.
>
>
>
>
>   



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