41–50 of 309 posts
I notice almost all defenses of 1-based indexing are purely based on arbitrary cultural factors or historical conventions, e.g. “that’s how it’s done in math”, rather than logical arguments.
1 or 0-based index... I recently picked up Lua for a toy project and I got to say that decades of training with 0-based indexes makes it hard for me to write correct lua code on the first try. I suppose 1-based index is more logical, but decades of programming languages choosing 0-based index is hard to ignore.
Why?
Numbering should start at π (2025) (umars.edu)
For instance, when dealing with memory words, do u address the word itself or its starting location (the first byte)?
The same consideration applies to coordinate systems: r u positioning urself at the center of a pixel or at the pixel's origin?
Almost 2 decades ago I designed an hierarchical IDs system (similar to OIDs[1]). First I made it 0-based for each index in the path. After a while I understood that I need to be able to represent invalid/dummy IDs also, so I used -1 for that. It was ugly - so I made it 1-based, & any 0 index would've made the entire ID - invalid
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I appreciate Dijkstra's arguments, but the fact remains that no non-technical user is ever going to jibe with a zero-indexed system, no matter the technical merits. Languages aimed at casual audiences (e.g. scripting languages like Lua) should maybe just provide two different ways of indexing into arrays: an `offset` method that's zero-indexed, and an `item` method that's one-indexed. Let users pick, in a way that's…
I appreciate Dijkstra's arguments, but the fact remains that no non-technical user is ever going to jibe with a zero-indexed system, no matter the technical merits. Languages aimed at casual audiences (e.g. scripting languages like Lua) should maybe just provide two different ways of indexing into arrays: an `offset` method that's zero-indexed, and an `item` method that's one-indexed. Let users pick, in a way that's…
At least we're not stuck with the Roman "inclusive counting" system that included one extra number in ranges* so that e.g. weeks have "8" days and Sunday is two days before Monday since Monday is itself included in the count.
1 or 0-based index... I recently picked up Lua for a toy project and I got to say that decades of training with 0-based indexes makes it hard for me to write correct lua code on the first try. I suppose 1-based index is more logical, but decades of programming languages choosing 0-based index is hard to ignore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes more sense if you think of indices as pointing between elements: 0 1 2 3 4 ----------------- | A | B | C | D | ----------------- -4 -3 -2 -1 -0 Except, of course, -0 doesn't exist. AFAIK that's why C# chose to add a special "index from end" operator, `^`, instead of using negative indices.
> Except, of course, -0 doesn't exist. Not for integers on modern hardware. If only hardware used ones’ complement ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ones'_complement)… ;-) Meanwhile, the workaround is to use -1 through -5 to index from the end of the array.
I appreciate Dijkstra's arguments, but the fact remains that no non-technical user is ever going to jibe with a zero-indexed system, no matter the technical merits. Languages aimed at casual audiences (e.g. scripting languages like Lua) should maybe just provide two different ways of indexing into arrays: an `offset` method that's zero-indexed, and an `item` method that's one-indexed. Let users pick, in a way that's…
There is no good reason to cater to non-technical users when designing programming languages. In what way is Lua “aimed at casual audiences”?
"one of the design goals, was for Lua to be easy for nonprogrammers to use"
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/lua/comments/w8wgqb/complete_interv...
The 1980s were not a particularly enlightened time for programming language design; and Dijkstra's opinions seem to carry extra weight mainly because his name has a certain shock and awe factor. It isn't usual for me to agree with the mathematical convention for notations, but the 1st element of a sequence being denoted with a "1" just seems obviously superior. I'm sure there is a culture that counts their first fing…
For math too, 0-based indexing is superior. When taking sub-matrices (blocks), with 1-based indexing you have to deal with + 1 and - 1 terms for the element indices. E.g. the third size-4 block of a 16x16 matrix begins at (3-1)*4+1 in 1-based indexing, at 2*4 in 0-based indexing (where the 2 is naturally the 0-indexed block index). Also, the origin is at 0, not at 1. If you begin at 1, you've already moved some dista…