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1-based indexing is strange to a programmer, but it's commonly used in mathematical computing software like Matlab. It's actually more convenient in a lot of ca

• rcthompson 10y ago
  As a primarily R and Python programmer, I've actually found that thinking in terms of 1-based indexing comes a lot more naturally to me than 0-based indexing, despite having worked exclusively in 0-based index languages for years before picking up R. The only confusing edge case I've encountered is in biology, when manipulating a genomic region of zero length. Such a region is used, for example, when representing the location of an insertion of additional sequence. Before the insertion, the region has zero length. So, if the insertion occurs after the 500th element, then the zero-length range, in 1-based indexing, starts at 501 and ends at 500. However, it's rarely necessary to deal with this case directly, as such a range can be constructed as "starting at 501 with length 0".