Comment by ScottBurson

It just blows my mind that someone building a database in the 21st century doesn't know that zero is not a special case. In my book, anyone who doesn't get that is a beginning programmer, not even intermediate.

I know it took people a while to get this originally. In the old days, for example, Fortran 'do' loops were always executed at least once, regardless of the values of the bounds. Nowadays we know better: you check the values at the top of the loop, not (just) the bottom, to handle the zero-iteration case correctly.

But now it should be burned into every developer's brain: counts can be zero, strings can be empty, lists can be empty, etc. etc. etc., and handling these cases correctly is critical. Zero is not a special case!!!