[REBOL] Re: Correct Behaviour? Was False = 2 ????
From: robbo1mark:aol at: 6-Jul-2001 10:59
JOEL,
Why can't you simply undertsand that your menatl model
( & mine 8) is a MUTILATION of REBOL.
Arithmetic is GOOD for you, it expands the mind.
cheers,
Mark Dickson
In a message dated Fri, 6 Jul 2001 10:44:42 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Joel Neely <[joel--neely--fedex--com]>
writes:
<< Hi, Robert,
Robert Lancaster wrote:
> Forgive me if I'm on the wrong thread for this observation..
> but some people have used an example
>
> Number of children in a house hold.
>
> 0: 3
> 1: 5
> 2: 6
> 3: 1
> 4: 4
>
> As an example of zero based indexing.
>
Well, sort of... I offered it as an example of a situation
where the natural sequence of values (call them "categories"
if you wish) runs from 0 upwards, rather than from 1 upwards.
Since it had been implied that such a situation would never
occur to normal people (systems programmers and academics
not being normal ;-), I thought I'd offer a normal-looking
example.
> It may be easy to program it into a zero based index. But
> the storage method does not reflect on the information the
> data represents.
>
You're absolutely correct. However, when our programming
language allows us to express directly what we're dealing
with in the problem domain, that's a very nice situation.
As a concrete example (see the thread on "byte frequencies"
for another), let's assume we have a block with trivial
census data similar to the above example, and write some
code to calculate the stats.
census: [
"PM" 1 "HD" 0 "SE" 0 "SK" 3 "JV" 2
"AT" 3 "NJ" 2 "JD" 4 "TC" 1 "KK" 1
]
tally: func [ndeps [block!] /local tots] [
tots: array/initial 5 0
foreach [who kids] ndeps [
poke tots 1 + kids 1 + pick tots 1 + kids
]
repeat ikids length? tots [
print rejoin [ikids - 1 ":" tab pick tots ikids]
]
]
which performs
>> tally census
0: 2
1: 3
2: 2
3: 2
4: 1
My "mental model" of this tally is a collection of buckets
labeled 0..4, but the code is sprinkled with "+ 1" and "- 1"
because I can't use that model directly.
-jn-
___________________________________________________________________
The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers!
- R. W. Hamming
joel'dot'neely'at'fedex'dot'com
