[PD-dev] proposed new "list" object

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, Frank Barknecht wrote:
> > Mathieu Bouchard hat gesagt: // Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> > > Also, about indexing, pretty much any list (or array) indexing I've seen
> > > starts at 0, including [tabread] and excluding A_DOLLAR and A_DOLLSYM.
> > Yes, please make indexing, slicing, first-ing and last-ing start with
> > zero. (It's my major gripe about the iem-matrix objects, that they
> > start indexing rows and cols at 1 ...)
> 
> Funny, me, it's my major gripe with mathematicians =)
> 
> Btw, did I last that jMax's [listelement] and [libsublist] also start 
> indexing at 0 ? And GF mimicks that behaviour.

I think, apart from aesthetic reasons, starting indexing at zero has
practical advantages. For example modulo-counting is a common
operation in Pd (many musicians have to deal with loops and bars), and
[mod 16] counts zerobased from 0-15. To access matrix-elements, a 
counter could feed:

[div height] [mod width]

to get zero-based indices to walk through the whole matrix. One-based
containers like Iem/zexy matrix require an additional addition.

For lists in Pd there probably are similar use cases available where
lists would profit from a consistent zero base. The only problem is
$1. ;)

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht                               _ ______footils.org__
             
          _ __latest track: "plak" @ http://footils.org/cms/show/44