163: Donald Knuth

Image Text

His books were kinda intimidating; rappelling down through his skylight seemed like the best option.

Explanation

Will follow. I promise!

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Discussion

In Pascal you define the lower and upper bounds of an array when you declare it, e.g.,

 anArray[-5 .. 5] OF integer

which has always struck me as a much better idea than having arrays always starting at 0. Jstout (talk) 20:41, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Why the swipe at Ada? I don't know about "the programming language of the future", but it's not a historical footnote either. It's used in many safety critical systems such as flight control, trains, even banking, and not just because that's what was used in the past. This language is still heavily used in these areas and is still being updated under MIL-STD and ISO.--108.162.217.185 15:33, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia verifies your claims. Removed. Suspender guy (talk) 20:28, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Same is true of BASIC; you can specify any range, including negative numbers (I have used this). I program in C as well though --108.162.245.140 03:29, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Actually, it depends on your version of BASIC. Early versions of BASIC had the OPTION BASE 0 and OPTION BASE 1 commands that would change the intial index of _all_ arrays to 0 or 1 respectively. 141.101.77.182 16:41, 29 April 2020 (UTC)Jurjen

Not related to the comic, but I think this is where the comic begins to look more detailed compared to the last 161 strips. I am talking about the art style. It is starting to look like the more familiar 400-current strips.Boeing-787lover 15:25, 29 June 2018 (UTC)