Comment by nine_k
16 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.
16 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.
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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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.)
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.
> 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.
And MATLAB. Doesn't make it any better that other languages have the same mistake.