Re: [PATCH] Exorcise "zero-dimensional" arrays (Was: Re: Should array_length() Return NULL)

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

> Fortran ... Basic ... actually I'd have thought that zero was a
> minority position.  Fashions change I guess.

When I started programming the top four languages for business
programming were COBOL, BASIC, RPG II, and assembly language.
(Pascal and C came later, and I never saw much use of Fortran by
anyone other than mathematicians.) Except for assembly language,
the subscripts for arrays either started with 1 always, or that was
the default.  Given when it was first developed, it's not too
surprising that the SQL standard adopted 1 as the first element of
an array.

Which is more natural depends on whether you think of the subscript
in terms of ordinal positions or offsets from the base address.

--
Kevin Grittner
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