what is the worst number and why?
A lot of them are bad in ways I can't think of, but the one that really freaks me out is 1.
1 = "get the square root"
1 = "see if 1 is prime to"
1 = "square root the hypotenuse"
1 = "delete 1 from a matrix"
1 = "draw a line between two points in the plane"
1 = "include a 1 in a line if the x-coordinate gets bigger than 1″
1 = "do the classical thing 2 times with an infinite series and get an infinite number of 1s in the result″
1 = "do a computation in a fixed-width font, display that output in a GUI, on a graphical display, and let the user change the font in an infinite number of ways″
1 = "display 60 shipped tesseracts in the GUI, each one labeled 1″
1 = "perform bloody horrible research with no testing, let that be an example for others"
1 = "use 1s for counter padding in an eventual GUI"
1 = "use 1s for counter padding in an eventual GUI, but don't let the user change the padding, because you of course must make the GUI easy on the eyes"