On Tue, 2006-02-21 at 11:15 +1030, Tim wrote: > Tim: > >> I really loathe its manner of starting counting from zero. Sure, it > >> makes sense for 0 to refer to a whole partition, and 1 for the first > >> partition. But 0 for the first drive is nonsensical. > > Kostas Sfakiotakis: > > Grub starts it's numbering from 0. > > I know that, I'm saying it's not user-friendly, nor has it ever been. > > Remember when we only had floppy drives? Some computers with two drives > had drives "zero" and "one", which is sheer stupidity in human terms. > Other more practical systems called them drive "one" and "two". > I understand your frustration. However, since computers always start counting with 0 it was natural for programming languages to do the same. This is just one example of how that shows to the users. Although it adds extra instructions in the program (and the extra time penalty in execution of those instructions) it is possible to make what the user sees the 'normal' counting process of 1,2,..... as most of us think of it. > It causes no end of problems because you HAVE to explain to someone that > it starts counting from zero instead of one. On the other hand, you > wouldn't have to explain things to people if they counted normally.
