8 ms·

Wow, I hadn’t seen this before. The history of this feud goes back before C. Thank you for a fascinating read!

• jandrese 8y ago
  Even Dijkstra weighed in on this: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF
  • e12e 8y ago
    I've always found this a rather weak argument - he even implies that 2...12 is at least as clear (it being the starting point of the text). I also thought I'd seen a longer text focusing more on the counting/indexing. I still don't see the appeal of "element at zero offset" vs simply "first element". I do agree that < vs <= etc can get messy. But outside of now fairly archaic programming languages I don't see the need. Just use a construct that handles ranges, like "for each element in collection/range/etc". (Or for math, "pattern matching" (or "for n in 1..m").
  • disgruntledphd2 8y ago
    I believe that may be cited in the article (but its not in an obvious place :) )