Comment by nine_k
2 months 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.
2 months 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.
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.
In fact zero-based has shown some undeniable advantages over one-based. I couldn't explain it better than Dijkstra's famous essay: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF
It's fine, I can see the advantages. I just think it's a weird level of blindness to act like 1 indexing is some sort of aberration. It's really not. It's actually quite friendly for new or casual programmers, for one.
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> 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.
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.
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.)
There was no change of course. Julia's AbstractArray interface requirements are just agnostic about array start indices. we have packages (e.g. OffsetArrays.jl) for arbitrary index ranges and that has existed for a long time.
If anything, the only significant change is that the community is becoming more and more convinced that offset array support is a bit of a footgun and makes it easy for bugs to sneak into generic code.
Let’s hope that they don’t also replicate ISO Fortran’s design flaws with lower array bounds, which contain enough pitfalls and portability problems that I don’t recommend their use.
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And MATLAB. Doesn't make it any better that other languages have the same mistake.