On 2018-May-17, Tom Lane wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> > Hang on, I can't be wrong (famous last words). If the negative
> > indexes were 0-based, that would mean that the first element of the
> > list was referenced by -0, which obviously can't be true, because 0 =
> > -0. In other words, we can't be using 0-based indexing for both the
> > positive and the negative values, because then 0 itself would be
> > ambiguous. It's got to be that -1 is the first element of the *pds
> > list, which means -- AFAICS, anyway -- that the way I phrased it is
> > correct.
> Maybe what you need is a redesign. This convention seems impossibly
> confusing and hence error-prone. What about using a separate bool to
> indicate which list the index refers to?
That was my impression I first came across this, FWIW, and I confess I
didn't try hard enough to understand it fully.
--
Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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