From where should the index start?

[Marc Clifton]

Intriguing discussion. :)

BobJanova wrote:

When they select one, you want to generate a report of the details of the record they selected (i.e. records[record_id]).

Erm: what about DataRow selectedRow = selectionEventArgs.SelectedRow; ?

BobJanova wrote:

You've got a network protocol where the last byte of a message (bytes[bytes.length - 1]) is a checksum.

Been there. I submit that the packet can be coded into a memory map (I did this as a union ages ago) to a structure, so I could write packet.Checksum OK, granted the packet was a fixed length. :)

BobJanova wrote:

One of the parameters to that method in all conventional languages is an 'index'

Yeah, which I find annoying. If the fields within the string are fixed length, then they can be put into a structure. If the fields aren't fixed length, then I submit that the language (you did ask originally, if I was defining a language) should allow for specifying, say, delimiters (which a variable length string of sub-fields would almost always need unless there was some encoding, like in compression, that determines the length) so that again, the programmer would be isolated from using indices. Marc

My Blog

[Luc Pattyn]

Nagy Vilmos wrote:

Which is easier to compute?

Neither. p+(n-1)*s equals (p-s)+n*s where (p-s) is a constant, just like p is, so all it takes is a different origin, the computational effort is exactly the same. :)

Luc Pattyn [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum

[PIEBALDconsult]

Wjousts wrote:

using zero as false is dangerous

Correct. Zero should be true. :-D I further agree that programming languages need a definite boolean type. Back when D was still being ironed out, I was one who argued in favor of a boolean type. It didn't happen, I don't use D.

[gumi_r msn com]

Collin Jasnoch wrote:

When you count Apples you DO start with 0. You used the word APPLE No? In computers that is where 0 starts, The definition. In Human tounge it is an implicit deffinition. Computers must work in concrete terms. You can't change that. Yes you can abstract it. But at a cost of efficiency.

That is a really wierd way to undersant it. We live in a 1 based indexing world. You said it yourself, we have the luxury of being able to omit the 0th element in our life precisely because it means NOTHING to us. Quite the contrary in the programming world, where the 0th element or the nth element are equally meaningful.

[PIEBALDconsult]

Nagy Vilmos wrote:

The array variable will be a pointer to a memory address

That's just a detail of implementation, this is a conceptual discussion.

[PIEBALDconsult]

Nagy Vilmos wrote:

by reducing the number of steps, you produce more efficient programs

Who cares? :confused:

[Nagy Vilmos]

Where we can, we should not be using indexes today. When we do, need to respect how things are stored.

---

Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett

[Nikunj_Bhatt]

I think you are still thinking ONLY about pointers. Suppose I have a listbox and I want to loop through all of its items (elements). I can start a loop like this in VB.NET "For i=0 to ListBox1.Items.Count-1" in Zero based index. Here you can see that there is one more calculation performed (ListBox1.Items.Count-1). If the index is based on One, the loop can be transformed to "For i=1 to ListBox1.Items.Count" which is using one less calculation than Zero based (Actually, this also depends on number of items in the listbox. The loop will need to calculate "Count-1" up to the number of items in the listbox.) In common sense, if there is "nothing" it means Zero and everything starts with One. And programmers are not computers, programming languages can be designed to use starting index as Zero or One or anything most preferred. The compiled code can address anything using the zero based index but this must not be necessary for a programmer/programming language to use the same. More and more programming languages feature are added just to ease programming, otherwise programming can be done directly in Binary.

[Nagy Vilmos]

I disagree that (p-s) is constant. It does not change much, but as p can be changed, re-assign the array for instance, the pointer cannot be taken as being to a constant place.

---

Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett

[Lost User]

You are missing the step that computers have to do. You placed those apples somewhere no? How is the computer suppose to know where that is? We as humans SEE them. A computer needs the reference. That reference is the what??? Thats right, the 0th index. If you switch it you are now forcing the computer to subract 1 off of every access.

Apples[] myAppleCollection; //In human terms the apple collection sitting right in front of me

By using the "Label" as you put it as the accessor the computer is able to be more efficient and access the first apple because it is the what? Yes, now you are getting it. The 0th index. If I want the second apple I reference it by adding the size of the apple to the collection. You can say this is the 'old' way of doing it, but under the hood it will always do it this way. It has to. If you can not grasp it you should not program.

BobJanova wrote:

The fundamental question is really: do you want a language for the computer, or one for the people who write it? I would prefer to write one for people and let the compiler or interpreter deal with the translation.

This may be the question but your answer is not complete. I want one that allows people to speak easily but at no cost to performance, i.e. the person still needs to understand what is being compiled. You can't get around that. I don't know the details of how a microwave works, but I know not to stick my fork in it. I also know that it will cook my cat (did anyone see that article.. I mean WTF?). If you do not understand the BASE technology of what you are using, you should not use it.

Computers have been intelligent for a long time now. It just so happens that the program writers are about as effective as a room full of monkeys trying to crank out a copy of Hamlet.

[PIEBALDconsult]

BobJanova wrote:

foreach doesn't require indexing

You don't know what's going on in the background.

[Lost User]

You are correct. I will fixy. Thank you:)

Computers have been intelligent for a long time now. It just so happens that the program writers are about as effective as a room full of monkeys trying to crank out a copy of Hamlet.

[PIEBALDconsult]

gumi_r@msn.com wrote:

it's they way we count

How many elephants are on the moon? Did you count them? You may not think about it, but you always count from zero.

[Lost User]

Dynamic allocations make it so that performance hit could go out to runtime. Furthermore, you can NOT say 1ms. It competely depends on the application. In some cases you could shatter the performance down to a crawl (arrays of arrays of arrays of arrays ......) For a simple GUI sure, no loss. But thats why MS has VB. You want a simple GUI that does little computation and can't be maintained with out turning into a gobbldy gook of sludge. Fine, program in VB. For the rest of the world and the programers that understand why it is 0 based and are not the slightest bit confused by it, we will continue to make our applications that out perform anything that could be made by this nonsence 1 based index language.

Computers have been intelligent for a long time now. It just so happens that the program writers are about as effective as a room full of monkeys trying to crank out a copy of Hamlet.

[BobJanova]

Erm: what about DataRow selectedRow = selectionEventArgs.SelectedRow If the UI control is data bound to the same list/data source, perhaps. But what if you want to use something in that row as a lookup in another table? OK, granted the packet was a fixed length That's a very big and unreasonable thing to grant ... one would only make that restriction because of language constraints, it's not natural to say a message must be exactly X bytes. Or how about simply reading strings out of a stream? Typically the stream will encode the length first, and then the content you want is stream[headerlength + 1 ... headerlength + length]. You can't map it onto a fixed structure because you don't know how big the content is going to be. I'm not convinced that every usage of Substring can be replaced so easily. After all, most modern languages have Split (or explode or something else that does the same job) for delimiter-separated fields, and people still use Substring a lot. Don't get me wrong, I agree that reducing the number of places indices (or offsets, as they are in most languages) are necessary is a good thing. I'm a big fan of enumeration and array operations. But I don't think a language without the capability of using them would be practical, particularly when you consider trying to interface with existing systems.

[Nagy Vilmos]

The point here is that Joe Coder doesn't need to manage the index.

---

Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett

[Lost User]

That may be a wierd way to understand it, but that is reality. If I tell my child to count the apples and he starts at 1 even though there are no apples he is not grasping mathematics. If there are apples and he starts at 0 he is not grasping efficiency. Computers can not ommit details. They have concrete logic, not fuzzy and everything need be explicityly defined. If that is not there basis then one one of a program with a locked data set could result in a different outcome over time. This would be chaotic and unproductive. And you want this because understanding the 0th index is too hard?

Computers have been intelligent for a long time now. It just so happens that the program writers are about as effective as a room full of monkeys trying to crank out a copy of Hamlet.

[Nagy Vilmos]

Using VB, is the problem there :-D. Seriously in C# it'd be:

for (int i = 0, i < ListBox1.Items.Count, i++) {

ListBox1.Items\[i\].property = stuff;

}

But also you can use foreach construct:

foreach (Object obj in ListBox1.Items) {
o0bj.property = stuff;
}

nikunjbhatt84 wrote:

The compiled code can address anything using the zero based index but this must not be necessary for a programmer/programming language to use the same.

So if you don't like indexes, don't use them.

nikunjbhatt84 wrote:

More and more programming languages feature are added just to ease programming, otherwise programming can be done directly in Binary.

If you'd actually done any machine code, you'd understand the problem with this statement. Higher level languages abstract mnore and more of the machine away, but saying that means you don't need to understand what is happening is stoopid.

---

Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done. Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DD Ethel Crudacre I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett

[Luc Pattyn]

it is a simple "translation transformation", i.e. a shift of origin: just make the pointer to an array of some type point to the zero-th element of the array, as is done in C-style languages; whether the zero-th element exists or not is immaterial. For a 1-based array of ints at address 0x1000, p would equal 0x0FFC (assuming a 4-byte int). So when allocating an int array in C, say malloc returns 0x1000 and you want that to point to an int array, subtract 4 and store the pointer. The compiler can do that for you; it also can adjust for size differences when you cast one pointer type to another (say casting a char* to an int*). In fact, the malloc case isn't special, just treat void as a type with size zero! :)

Luc Pattyn [My Articles] Nil Volentibus Arduum

[Marc Clifton]

BobJanova wrote:

If the UI control is data bound to the same list/data source, perhaps. But what if you want to use something in that row as a lookup in another table?

Well, a better implementation would be:

Person somePerson = selectionEventArgs.Person;
Address personAddress = Person.Address;

One of things I would definitely design into a new language is the ability to utilize foreign key and unique key schema information to reference other tables, and that those tables and their fields could be used directly, at compile time, from the schema definition. No ORM required.

BobJanova wrote:

That's a very big and unreasonable thing to grant ... one would only make that restriction because of language constraints, it's not natural to say a message must be exactly X bytes.

Agreed, but I would provide a mechanism in the language to specify variable length fields with the IOC option to determine lengths at runtime.

BobJanova wrote:

Or how about simply reading strings out of a stream? Typically the stream will encode the length first, and then the content you want is stream[headerlength + 1 ... headerlength + length]. You can't map it onto a fixed structure because you don't know how big the content is going to be.

Well, by definition, a stream is read sequentially, so indexing shouldn't be done on the stream itself. And again, I'd create the language so that variable length fields can be defined in a structure into which the stream can be read. I'm just trying to think outside the box, how to eliminate indexing completely through language supported syntax and features. Marc

My Blog