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

On 04/04/13 03:02, Florian Pflug wrote:
> On Apr3, 2013, at 15:30 , Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:
>> On 04/02/2013 02:46 PM, Florian Pflug wrote:
>>> If we're going to break compatibility, we should IMHO get rid of
>>> non-zero lower bounds all together. My guess is that the number of
>>> affected users wouldn't be much higher than for the proposed patch,
>>> and it'd allow lossless mapping to most language's native array types…
>> That would actually break a HUGE number of users, since the default lower
>> bound is 1. I have seen any number of pieces if code that rely on that.
> Uh, yeah, we should make it 1 then, not 0, then. As long as the bound
> is fixed, conversion to native C/Java/Ruby/Python/... arrays would still
> be lossless.
>
> best regards,
> Florian Pflug
>
>
Zero as the default lower bound is consistent with most languages
(especially the common ones like C, C++, Java, & Python), in fact I
don't remember any language where that is not the case (ignoring SQL) -
and I've written programs in about 20 languages.

Maybe we should adopt the famous compromise of '0.5'?  :-)


Cheers,
Gavin