Hi Yoshiki, 
as you and others pointed out:
>  Also, in Smalltalk, Streams are 0-based as nicolas and others
>mentioned.
>  The AltoFileStream should've follow this convension, instead of
>allowing [1..size] indices.

I agree! It not only *should* follow this convention, but it *must* follow it.

After all, I programmed AltoFileStream to be used by the Hobbes Emulator, which 
expects a FileStream to read the snapshot. So I subclassed FileStream and tried 
to implement its protocol. Later I found out, that ReadStream suffices for this 
purpose. Anyway, I had to implement the semantics of #postion and #position: as 
expected by the Hobbes Emulator. Since I didn't find a specification of that 
protocol, I naively assumed that position is supposed to be in [1..size]. After 
all, this is the natural range of indexes in Smalltalk, isn't it?

But I was utterly wrong, which I found out when I tried to make Hobbes read the 
snapshot from an AltoDisk.

The position is supposed to be in range [0..size]. Which looks very unnatural to 
me. With this range, position looses the nice property of being a valid index. 
So you have to make sure you never access the byte indexed by the current 
position. Instead you always use current position + 1. Unix files are more 
elegant in this respect. Their position is in the range [0..size), which happens 
to be the range of valid "Unix indexes". And I feel much more comfortable with
[0..size) than with [0..size] or [1..size].

Thanks to everyone on this list for their answers! I've learned a lot!

Greetings
Wolfgang, a humble programmer
--
Weniger, aber besser.