From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Aug 29 22:19:18 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id WAA19565 for questions-outgoing; Fri, 29 Aug 1997 22:19:18 -0700 (PDT) Received: from srv.net (snake.srv.net [199.104.81.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id WAA19554 for ; Fri, 29 Aug 1997 22:19:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: from darkstar.home (pmif182.ida.net [204.228.203.182]) by srv.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id XAA26405 for ; Fri, 29 Aug 1997 23:19:10 -0600 (MDT) Date: Fri, 29 Aug 1997 22:18:36 -0700 (MST) From: Charles Mott X-Sender: cmott@darkstar.home To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ppp and internal modem In-Reply-To: <19970830133038.30783@lemis.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Sat, 30 Aug 1997, Greg Lehey wrote: > On Thu, Aug 28, 1997 at 11:52:14PM -0600, Wes Peters wrote: > > bob olbrich writes: > >> Here's some new thoughts. During the FreeBSD installation procedure > >> you have to select "ppp interface on serial port 1 (com2)". This > >> sounds strange. We are trying for com1 are we not. > > > > No. Like all reasonable systems, UNIX begins labelling serial ports and > > other resources with the first counting number, 0. If you have two > > serial ports, they are numbered 0 and 1. DOS, developed by illiterates > > for illiterates, calls these COM1 and COM2. > > To be fair, there's a great tradition of counting from 1. Humans did > it for centuries, and languages like FORTRAN still do. Of course, > this caused untold trouble when fitting device numbers into bit > fields, so it makes more sense to start counting at 0. > > Greg I was just doing some scripting in awk, and the array indices seemed to start with 1 and not 0, and this language was invented by the same person who started C.