In article <3c8b9f31@news.povray.org> , "Anders K." <and### [at] prostard2gcom>
wrote:

>> If you take a sequence of pictures, do the call the initial picture in the
>> sequence the 0th or the 1st picture?
>
> Well, if you make an array, say a[], in C++, do you call a[0] the 0th or the
> 1st element? For that matter, does it even matter what you call it?

The reason for zero-based counting in programming languages is not because of
a certain "preference", but because of a necessity to provide efficiency.
Using one-based counting (also it it would avoid many bugs) is significantly
less efficient than zero-based counting and especially in the early days would
have been impossible to implement without significant hardware expense!

And maybe I missed something, but how many non-computer programming uses of
zero-based counting are there?  Not really any unless they are badly derived
from some computer functionality!!!  So using a limitation of regular
programming languages to justify zero-based counting is the worst of all
arguments possible and the least valid.  And I should point out that this is
*only* in most but not all programming languages - nearly all books on
theoretical computer science use one based counting because of its natural
simplicity which has been discovered by humans thousands of years ago and
proven itself!  Only because to program computers efficiently in their early
days (and which existed in their current form only for a few decades) the
uniformly accepted standard of counting should be considered a matter of
personal preference?  Oh well :-(

>> It hasn't been possible in any 3.5 beta
>
> Huh? I just rendered this scene, and it worked fine in beta 12:
>   // +kfi0 +kff4
>   #debug concat(str(frame_number, 0, -1), "\n")
>
> I've also rendered several animations (with 3.5 betas) which needed an
> Initial_Frame of 0.

Indeed, the checking isn't applied everywhere...

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

Post a reply to this message