Comment by cmrdporcupine

Comment by cmrdporcupine 14 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.

teo_zero 13 hours ago

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

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cmrdporcupine 13 hours ago

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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- fc417fc802 6 hours ago
  
  I think the objection is not so much blindness as the idea that professional tools should not generally be tailored to the needs of new or casual users at the expense of experienced users.
  
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- IshKebab 3 hours ago
  
  Is there any actual evidence that new programmers really find this hard? Python is renowned for being beginner friendly and I've never heard of anyone suggesting it was remotely a problem.
  There are only a few languages that are purely for beginners (LOGO and BASIC?) so it's a high cost to annoy experienced programmers for something that probably isn't a big deal anyway.
  
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fc417fc802 6 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.)

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nine_k 14 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.

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bsder 6 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.

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