Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

[Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 03 November 2005 10:24 am, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> on't confuse how humans count things, how the system counts partitions,
> and how grub count things. Grub is confusing, because contrary to other
> designers, they chose to start to count things from number 0 onwards -
> perhaps because in C programming arrays are 0 based and this way the
> program saves one step complexity, making it smaller and compact, versus
> human readable.
>
>   I don't even think they made this choice, but rather the bios designers
>   made it several years ago. Grub simply uses it. I'd have to check this
>   out to make sure, though.
Basing arrays at zero or 1 have been a debate in the technical community for 
a long time before C before COBOL and FORTRAN. In essence it comes down to 
tables and offsets. The C language is an operating system implementation 
language, and therefore tends toward zero based arrays. Some languages, the 
developer can chose to start an array at 0, 1 or 23 for that matter. GRUB's 
menu config was not intended to be edited by you humans, only by us C 
programmers who happen to live within 10 miles of MIT :-)


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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