cranky young man

[trochee]

things that make me crazy today:

• inconsistent choices between zero-based and one-based numbering schemes
• obscure error messages
• putting lots of source into header files
• header file names do not match class names
• source control that consists of renaming the file in the same directory. and leaving it there with the binary ("hmm -- which code do you think he used to build this? was it newfeatures.h or features.h or experimental-features.h?")

I feel like the inverse of the cranky old man. I am sitting in my rocking chair ergo desk chair, and saying "back in my day" "these days," I mutter, "we have tools for this sort of thing. And we don't keep it all straight in our heads. I don't care if 'disk crash' was a literal term when you were starting -- putting all the vowels in the variable name doesn't cost extra any more."

Comments

Re: zero-based!

[trochee.livejournal.com]

at least feminism has the decency to have numbered Waves (unlike music).
I'd never considered this. Yet Another Good Thing about feminism.

I agree with your feeling about the one-based indexing, but line numbers make sense in some applications. Now, if you could convince all the GNU textutils to start numbering lines at zero (e.g. head -0 gets you one line, and emacs reports line numbers starting with zero) then I'm on board.

Until then, we cope.

Re: zero-based!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_dkg_/]

actually, to my mind, current behavior of head is right.

head -1 should return 1 line, not 2. one way to read it is: return all the lines before line number N. But an even better way to read it is return 1 line, starting at the beginning of the file. The way you shouldn't read it is return me line number 1 because that's just wrong.

emacs line numbering and grep -n output do both seem wrong to me, though i can't imagine it changing, ever. which is too bad.