Comment by WalterBright

4 months ago

> 0 indices are hard?

I started out with BASIC and Fortran, which use 1 based indices. Going to C was a small bump in the road getting used to that, and then it's Fortran which is the oddball.

2 comments

WalterBright

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int_19h  3 months ago

Most oldschool BASIC dialects (including the original Dartmouth IIRC) use 0-based indices, though. It's the worst of both worlds, where something like:

  DIM a(10)

actually declares an array of 11 elements, with indices from 0 to 10 inclusive.

I believe it was QBASIC that first borrowed the ability to define ranges explicitly from Pascal, so that we could do:

  DIM a(1 TO 10)

etc to avoid the "zero element tax"

Ygg2  4 months ago

Interesting path. I went Basic, and Pascal and then C in college. Honestly it was such a mind twist.