Numbering Should Start at Zero
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Numbering Should Start at Zero
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Re: Numbering Should Start at Zero
#2He’s not wrong, but ask any normal person “What’s the first thing on this list” and see what happens…
Re: Numbering Should Start at Zero
#3Unfortunately most of the world disagrees
Re: Numbering Should Start at Zero
#4He’s not wrong, but ask any normal person “What’s the first thing on this list” and see what happens…
For me first and one are synonyms. It's even abbreviated as 1st instead of 0st.
Re: Numbering Should Start at Zero
#5I understand this as follows:
If directly accessing byte-addressable memory, the command, 'go to address 0xff and get me the data stored in the ten bytes beginning at 0xff' will return data at 0xff + 0, 0xff + 1, ..., 0xff + 9. Hence counting should start at zero, with the zeroth byte. Describing this sequence as range(0, 10) is convenient since 10 - 0 gives us the count of bytes in the sequence.
If accessing objects in an linear data structure via an interface, at a higher level of abstraction, then a natural choice is to label the objects starting with one, i.e. get the 1st object's data, get the 2nd object's data, ..., get the 10th objects's data. Note, range(1, 11) still works as 11 - 1 gives us the total object count. (Python seems to get this right in both cases, i.e (inclusive, exclusive)).
However, if one is also using low-level byte-addressable memory at the same time, this can get unnecessarily confusing, so it's probably simpler to just always count starting at zero, for consistency's sake - unless you're writing a user interface for people who've been trained to start with one?
Re: Numbering Should Start at Zero
#6I always found array index confusing.
For example, given a array with size N in Python, we can iterate it from 0 to N-1 (onwards) and from -1 to -N (backwards), which is not consistent at all.
Programming language is meant for human eyes. It would be better if array index being 1 to N, and let the compiler substract that 1 for us.
Re: Numbering Should Start at Zero
#7I always found array index confusing. For example, given a array with size N in Python, we can iterate it from 0 to N-1 (onwards) and from -1 to -N (backwards), which is not consistent at all. Programming language is meant for human eyes. It would be better if array index being 1 to N, and let the compiler substract that 1 for us.
Obviously comes from a time when you were either not using a compiler, or you were writing a compiler. Compared to many other foundational oddities in software engineering this is a really minor one, and at this point it is impossible to change. Any new language starting arrays at index 1 would feel unattractive to me.
Re: Numbering Should Start at Zero
#8I always found array index confusing. For example, given a array with size N in Python, we can iterate it from 0 to N-1 (onwards) and from -1 to -N (backwards), which is not consistent at all. Programming language is meant for human eyes. It would be better if array index being 1 to N, and let the compiler substract that 1 for us.
Obviously comes from a time when you were either not using a compiler, or you were writing a compiler. Compared to many other foundational oddities in software engineering this is a really minor one, and at this point it is impossible to change. Any new language starting arrays at index 1 would feel unattractive to me.
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Re: Numbering Should Start at Zero
#9Once you flatten multidimensional arrays the folly of starting at 1 becomes apparent (much like mathematics got so much simpler when we switched to logarithms with the "obvious" log a + log b = log ab which was a breakthrough at the time).
If you have a two dimensional array A (1..N X 1..M), then flattening it becomes A[i][j] = flat[i + (j-1) * N]
Continuing to higher dimensions it only gets uglier.
0-based arrays are far simpler. When flattening A (0..N-1 X 0..M-1) A[i][j] becomes flat[i + N * j].
It's completely analogous to how our base-10 positional system works. Each digit doesn't start at 1, they start at 0, which is why 237 is just 2*10^2 + 3*10^1 + 7*10^0.
ADD: TIL HN supports escaping the astrix.