Comment by IshKebab

18 hours ago

Not to mention the 1-based indexing sin. JavaScript has a lot of WTFs but they got that right at least.

21 comments

IshKebab

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nine_k  17 hours ago

This indeed is not Algol (or rather C) heritage, but Fortran heritage, not memory offsets but indices in mathematical formulae. This is why R and Julia also have 1-based indexing.

  • cmrdporcupine  16 hours ago

    Pascal. Modula-2. BASIC. Hell, Logo.

    Lately, yes, Julia and R.

    Lots of systems I grew up with were 1-indexed and there's nothing wrong with it. In the context of history, C is the anomaly.

    I learned the Wirth languages first (and then later did a lot of programming in MOO, a prototype OO 1-indexed scripting language). Because of that early experience I still slip up and make off by 1 errors occasionally w/ 0 indexed languages.

    (Actually both Modula-2 and Ada aren't strictly 1 indexed since you can redefine the indexing range.)

    It's funny how orthodoxies grow.

    • fc417fc802  8 hours ago

      As I understand it Julia changed course and is attempting to support arbitrary index ranges, a feature which Fortran enjoys. (I'm not clear on the details as I don't use either of them.)

    • nine_k  15 hours ago

      Pascal, frankly, allowed to index arrays by any enumerable type; you could use Natural (1-based), or could use 0..whatever. Same with Modula-2; writing it, I freely used 0-based indexing when I wanted to interact with hardware where it made sense, and 1-based indexes when I wanted to implement some math formula.

    • bsder  7 hours ago

      > Lots of systems I grew up with were 1-indexed and there's nothing wrong with it. In the context of history, C is the anomaly.

      The problem is that Lua is effectively an embedded language for C.

      If Lua never interacted with C, 1-based indexing would merely be a weird quirk. Because you are constantly shifting across the C/Lua barrier, 1-based indices becomes a disaster.

idle_zealot  18 hours ago

Does it count as 0-indexing when your 0 is a floating point number?

  • krackers  17 hours ago

    Actually in JS array indexing is same as property indexing right? So it's actually looking up the string '0', as in arr['0']

    • idle_zealot  17 hours ago

      Huh. I always thought that JS objects supported string and number keys separately, like lua. Nope!

        [Documents]$ cat test.js
  let testArray = [];
  testArray[0] = "foo";
  testArray["0"] = "bar";
  console.log(testArray[0]);
  console.log(testArray["0"]);
  [Documents]$ jsc test.js
  bar bar
  [Documents]$

      3 replies →

bigstrat2003  13 hours ago

There's nothing wrong with 1-based indexing. The only reason it seems wrong to you is because you're familiar with 0-based, not because it's inherently worse.

  • IshKebab  2 hours ago

    That's simply untrue. 1-based indexing is inherently worse because it leads to code that is less elegant and harder to understand. And slightly less efficient but that's a minor factor.