Path: dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu!spool.maxwell.syr.edu!drn.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.icl.net!newsfeed.fjserv.net!feed.news.tiscali.de!uninett.no!newsfeed1.e.nsc.no!news4.e.nsc.no.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: Tore Newsgroups: comp.databases.theory Subject: Re: Why do programmers start counting from 0? Reply-To: tore.trollsaasXATX@skedsmo.online.no Message-ID: References: <1102561639.956419.146550@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com> X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.93/32.576 English (American) X-No-Archive: yes MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 22 NNTP-Posting-Host: 80.213.183.252 X-Complaints-To: news-abuse@telenor.net NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 08:30:38 MET X-Trace: news4.ulv.nextra.no 1102836638 80.213.183.252 Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2004 08:30:06 +0100 Xref: dp-news.maxwell.syr.edu comp.databases.theory:28998 On 8 Dec 2004 19:07:20 -0800, timothychung@gmail.com wrote: >One day, I started wondering why we start counting from 0 and couldn't >find a good search string to get much out from google.com. Can anyone >help me? > >One of the advantage I can think of is modulus of that number gives a >more organised result. > >Or is it just because of binary representation of our number? >Please help. Thanks. :) Believe this is the answer... In the old assembler days, elements in an arrays were referenced by start-of-array-address and and offset value. Offset = 0 obviously pointing to start of the first element in the array. This technique was inherited by most of the machinecode-near or academic/university developed languages and then carried on from there. Other, more business related languages, started counting from 1. Regards Tore