News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Again on 0-based vs. 1-based indexing. Parent comment

Re:Again on 0-based vs. 1-based indexing by yodelshady on Thursday January 21, 2021 @11:31AM (#25860689)
No, you have no branches, because the "no element" case is *not a slice! It is a type error at generation!

Instead, I'm dealing with that case at literally every one of thousands of places where I might receive it*! That's not clean.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Again on 0-based vs. 1-based indexing by alentist on Sunday January 24, 2021 @03:07AM (#25890286)
It is. Just like 0 is a natural number, the empty string is a string, the empty set is a set, etc.

If you've worked with mathematical proofs before, you'll have experience with how they make proofs shorter and more elegant.

That's why they're natural base cases.

[ Parent | on HN ]