If we're going to break compatibility, we should IMHO get rid of non-zero lower bounds all together. My guess is that the number of affected users wouldn't be much higher than for the proposed patch, and it'd allow lossless mapping to most language's native array types…
That would actually break a HUGE number of users, since the default lower bound is 1. I have seen any number of pieces if code that rely on that.
Uh, yeah, we should make it 1 then, not 0, then. As long as the bound is fixed, conversion to native C/Java/Ruby/Python/... arrays would still be lossless.
best regards, Florian Pflug
Zero as the default lower bound is consistent with most languages (especially the common ones like C, C++, Java, & Python), in fact I don't remember any language where that is not the case (ignoring SQL) - and I've written programs in about 20 languages.
pascal, ADA, and ALGOL like languages
Regards
Pavel
Maybe we should adopt the famous compromise of '0.5'? :-)