• @grue
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    111 year ago

    Oh, for fuck’s sake.

    Your thumb is not your zeroth finger; it’s your first finger.

    Starting from zero is for situations when you’re counting the left (or first) edge of containers used to hold items. For example, if you wanted to count the number of balls you could hold in the spaces between your fingers, you start with 0 because the number of balls you can hold between your thumb and {} is 0.

    • @[email protected]
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      91 year ago

      Indices vs offsets. A lot of people mistake the two because they took CS 101 and thought it was so cool to say I sTaRt cOuNtInG fRoM zErO.

    • macniel
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      41 year ago

      But length of container gives you for example 3, and it has a size of 4. Explain that.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 year ago

        length measures the spaces between the spaces between your fingers, so you can fit 3 balls between the 4 balls between your fingers

    • @[email protected]
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      31 year ago

      Also indexes. Once you’ve been bitten enough by off-by-one errors this actually becomes a pretty handy double-check.

      • darcy
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        11 year ago

        indexes in memory can be thought of as the address of the leftmost bit in a byte (container)