[REBOL] Re: On ordinal and cardinal numbers...
From: dness:home at: 7-Jul-2001 17:31
Joel Neely wrote:
...
> This really is familiar to anyone who's used 0-origin. The
> 60 minutes in an hour range from 0 to 59. The 24 hours in
> a standard 24-hour clock range from 0 to 23.
Not to `normal' humans. For most of us a `standard clock' is
[12AM, 1AM, ... 11AM, 12PM, 1PM, ..., 11PM]
and at TV guide (for reasons that are probably obvious) we
used [6,...,29] for a `standard day'. again for `communications'
reasons.
Note also that astrophysical days start at noon, not midnight, and
days in the Jewish calendar, I think, start at Sunset.
So even here there's a veritable panoply of 0- and other- origin
indexing.
My conclusion is that Sassenrath is correct:
0-origin indexing is enormously intellectually more satisfying
(J and K, current day derivatives of APL, for example, use it)
but for `normal' communication 1- is probably the better choice.
And since it;s his playing field, bat and ball, I'm content with the
choice. For me, more alternatives wouldn't be better...
