Dotan Cohen wrote:
On 2/22/06, Mike McCarty mike.mccarty@sbcglobal.net wrote:
Tim wrote:
On Tue, 2006-02-21 at 16:58 -0600, Jeff Vian wrote:
However, since computers always start counting with 0 it was natural for programming languages to do the same. This is just one example of how that shows to the users.
More like programmers never really put any good thought into what they were doing. The number of times I recall having to fix up someone's FOR A = 0 TO 10 sort of things so they'd count the right number of times...
How many fingers am I holding up...?
Eight, and two thumbs. But there are only nine gaps between them...
Fence post error!
Mike
Are thumbs not fingers? I have a broken one now- so would it be inacurate to say that I had broken a finger?
Thumbs are digits, but they are not fingers. Toes are also digits. But if you ask someone "How many fingers do you have?", the answer is ten. In aggregate, thumbs are fingers, but individually, they are not. Some aspects of English are pretty confusing. Like to discuss uniplurals? Or words which have two different forms for the plural, but with different meanings? How about verbs which have different conjugations depending on what the object of the action is? How about words which are their own antonyms? (That's one of my favorite categories.)
By the way, if you hold one hand in front of the other, you can hold up ten fingers with only eight gaps between them!
Heck, I can hold up my fingers with *no* gaps between them! Beat that!
Mike