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Computer Science Educators

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    $\begingroup$ The half-intervals decomposing into half-intervals is a nice touch. Dijkstra's explanation does good job of justifying the use of the common scheme within CS as it was becoming a modern science. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 3, 2018 at 6:53
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    $\begingroup$ Nice contribution and good insight. You've made this corner of the internet a better place :) Welcome to Computer Science Educators. Take a look around, I'd love to know what else you can add. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 3, 2018 at 12:11
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    $\begingroup$ While a good reason to start indexing at 0, it feels much easier and more natural to mentally parse (d) and especially (c) than (a) or (b) - "numbers from x to y" in natural language usually means inclusive of both (or exclusive of both) $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 4, 2018 at 13:34
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    $\begingroup$ @msam: Fully closed or fully open may be "more natural," but the subtraction property of half-open is extremely important. The interval [a, a+b) is exactly b elements long, without any pesky +1 or -1 terms. You simply cannot avoid having +1s and -1s everywhere when you use fully closed or fully open intervals. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 5, 2018 at 1:30
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    $\begingroup$ This also matches the behavior of the modulo operator, the return value of which lies in [0, n). number_of_values_ending_in_a_particular_digit[x % 10] += 1 $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 5, 2018 at 1:48