off-by-one error (programming) (Or "Obi-Wan error") An exceedingly common error induced in many ways, such as by starting at zero when you should have started at one or vice-versa, or by writing "< N" instead of "<= N" or vice-versa. Often confounded with fencepost error, which is properly a particular subtype of it.
The term zeroth corrects the linguistic off-by-one error of, e.g., referring to the "1st" element of an array whose indexes start from zero. [Jargon File] Last updated: 1998-09-21
