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Maybe this is a stupid idea, but at this point the economy is tied to 0-based indexing so much, that I would rather get math moved to 0-based indexing, than com
by xiphias2 8y ago
Maybe this is a stupid idea, but at this point the economy is tied to 0-based indexing so much, that I would rather get math moved to 0-based indexing, than computing to 1-based indexing.
Being able to easily port code between languages (and math articles) is important, when there's no clear winner, I like consistency.
- Certhas 8y agoGood luck with that. The 0-based indexing is non-existent outside of programming. No one who doesn't do pointer arithmetic would come up with it. In mathematics 1...N is a perfectly good notation. Julia expresses the same idea with 1:N. This is consistent with spoken language (1 denotes the 1st element). Consistency, if anything, would not come down in favor of the software engineering choice here.
- xiphias2 8y agoA lot of new very important papers in i.e. machine learning, quantitative finance come _after_ being implemented in computer code. I just looked at some, and they already seem to use 0 index for the initial states / base layer... here's just one example, where 0 and 1 based indexing is mixed, but I see it everywhere: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02717.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.02717.pdf
- Zanni 8y agoExcept European hotels, where the first floor is one up from the ground floor, making floor number effectively zero-based.