Re:

[Duck <duck@...>]

> I don't care whether you buy them.  For
> many, me included, they are more natural.

Which "elevator (lift) nomenclature" do you prefer? American or European?

I prefer the Eurostyle, where there's a special name for the floor of a 
building which is at street level (ground floor, erdgeschoss, 
rez-de-chaussee), and where you have to go up one floor to get to the 
first floor of the building (self-contradictory though that sounds when 
you say it).

OTOH, I can't argue with the logic of the American system, where the first 
floor of a building (at street level) is called 1, the second called 2, 
and so forth, but it takes a couple of days in North America (or Japan) to 
remember that when the elevator signals "1," it's time to get out. If you 
wait for the next floor, you'll find yourself whisked back up :-)

Of course, the European system is slightly more natural when a building 
has basement floors, which can be numbered negatively without creating a 
"gap" at street level. (What I think of as the BC/AD issue. Should there 
be a 0AD? Or, for that matter, a BC0?)

I still maintain that the problem around nils in tables is more 
fundamental that the basedness of arrays, since it is a sort of 
singularity.

Zero-based and one-based arrays are equivalent and can be unambiguously 
mapped from one to another (IIRC the cardinalities of the natural numbers 
and of the non-negative integers are the same). The off-by-one problems 
exist in equal measure in both systems, as an unavoidable consequence of 
the fencepost principle (Wednesday is two days after Monday. But if you 
take vacation from Monday to Wednesday, it costs you three days' leave. 
Doesn't matter whether you consider the week starts on Sunday or on 
Monday, or at day zero or one.)

'Strong-nilled' tables and 'weak-nilled' tables simply can't robustly be 
mapped from one to another other than in the internals of the language 
runtime, IMO. So a language feature to select at run-time whether a table 
should operate strongly or weakly with respect to nils would surely bury 
this perennial point of contention eternally, to the satisfaction of all 
parties.

Not that I feel strongly about it :-)