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The base level doesn't need to have a floor, it's just ground. Once you add a floor you are on the first floor above ground. Really your condescending tone as i

The base level doesn't need to have a floor, it's just ground. Once you add a floor you are on the first floor above ground. Really your condescending tone as if all the mathematicians that prefer to work with 1 indexing are just incompetent is grating. I'm happy to be writing ``` for i in 1:n func!(a[i]) end ``` to iterate over an object of length n. Or split an array as a[1:m], b[m+1:n]. Slicing semantics which are far more prevalent in my code (and the code I read) than index arithmetic, are truly vastly simplified by 1 based indexing of Julia compared to the 0 based numpy conventions. We simply no longer code in the world that Dijkstra argued for, and I have not seen anybody give a clear argument that is actually rooted in maths and contemporary programming. I genuinely thought that the Python convention was brilliant, and that 1-based indexing in Julia would suck. It turned out not to be the case.

jacobolus 8y ago
Sorry, that last bit of my comment was gratuitous. I am legitimately (mildly) curious about the history of the different naming conventions for floors of buildings though. > The base level doesn't need to have a floor, it's just ground. Once you add a floor you are on the first floor above ground. Yes, my point is this is an example where the European 0-based indexing system makes more sense (in my opinion) than the American 1-based indexing system. I speculate that whoever started calling the ground floor the “first floor” hadn’t really put much thought into how well that would generalize to large buildings with many floors including some underground. Similarly, whoever decided the calendar should start at year 1 AD with the prior year as 1 BC hadn’t really considered that it might be nice to do arithmetic with intervals of years across the boundary. There are many standard mathematical formulas which are clarified by indexing from 0. But nobody can switch because the 1-indexed version is culturally fixed. Most of the rest of the time the 0-indexed vs. 1-indexed versions makes basically no difference. It is rare that the 1-indexed version is notably nicer. > Or split an array as a[1:m], a[m+1:n] Yes, I find it substantially clearer to write this split as a[:m], a[m:]. Particularly when dealing with e.g. parsing serialized structured data. But also when writing numerical code. Carrying the extra 1s around just adds clutter, and forces me to add and subtract 1s all over the place; reasoning about it adds mental overhead, and extra bugs sneak in. (At least when writing Matlab code; I haven’t spent much time with Julia.)

jacobolus 8y ago

Sorry, that last bit of my comment was gratuitous. I am legitimately (mildly) curious about the history of the different naming conventions for floors of buildings though. > The base level doesn't need to have a floor, it's just ground. Once you add a floor you are on the first floor above ground. Yes, my point is this is an example where the European 0-based indexing system makes more sense (in my opinion) than the American 1-based indexing system. I speculate that whoever started calling the ground floor the “first floor” hadn’t really put much thought into how well that would generalize to large buildings with many floors including some underground. Similarly, whoever decided the calendar should start at year 1 AD with the prior year as 1 BC hadn’t really considered that it might be nice to do arithmetic with intervals of years across the boundary. There are many standard mathematical formulas which are clarified by indexing from 0. But nobody can switch because the 1-indexed version is culturally fixed. Most of the rest of the time the 0-indexed vs. 1-indexed versions makes basically no difference. It is rare that the 1-indexed version is notably nicer. > Or split an array as a[1:m], a[m+1:n] Yes, I find it substantially clearer to write this split as a[:m], a[m:]. Particularly when dealing with e.g. parsing serialized structured data. But also when writing numerical code. Carrying the extra 1s around just adds clutter, and forces me to add and subtract 1s all over the place; reasoning about it adds mental overhead, and extra bugs sneak in. (At least when writing Matlab code; I haven’t spent much time with Julia.)