python list index - an easy question
Gregory Ewing
greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Mon Dec 19 16:43:35 EST 2016
BartC wrote:
> But if you needed a table of the frequencies of letters A to Z...
> An N-based array can simply have bounds of ord('A') to ord('Z')
> inclusive.
That's fine if your language lets you have arrays with
arbitrary lower bounds.
But if the language only allows a fixed lower bound, and
furthermore insists that the lower bound be 1, then your
indexing expression becomes:
table[ord(letter) - ord('A') + 1]
If a language is only going to allow me a single lower
bound, I'd rather it be 0, because I can easily shift
that by whatever offset I need. But if it's 1, often
I need to cancel out an unwanted 1 first, leading to code
that's harder to reason about.
--
Greg
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