Python Feature Request: Allow changing base of member indices to 1

[Nick Craig-Wood]

Sherm Pendley <spamtrap at dot-app.org> wrote:
>  "Paddy" <paddy3118 at googlemail.com> writes:
> 
> > Having more than one index start point would be a maintenance
> > nightmare best avoided.
> 
>  Quite right.
> 
> > (It can be done in Perl).
> 
>  When was the last time you used Perl? It was allowed in Perl 4 and earlier,
>  because many Perl users were moving from Awk, which uses an array base of 1.
>  Even then, having multiple index start points within a single program wasn't
>  the idea; the idea was to allow programs originally written in Awk to be
>  ported to Perl with minimal updating.
> 
>  It was deprecated as of 5.0 though - which was released in '94. It still
>  works, for the sake of backwards compatibility, but its use in new code is
>  highly discouraged.

I seem to remember from "Programming Perl" that Larry Wall said it was
a serious mistake to add this feature to perl.

If it is a feature too far for perl then it is *definitely* a feature
too far for python ;-)

-- 
Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick