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I primarily work in 1-indexed languages, but I think everyone is missing the forest from the trees in this discussion: indexing should be selectable by the prog

I primarily work in 1-indexed languages, but I think everyone is missing the forest from the trees in this discussion: indexing should be selectable by the programmer. One or zero indexing is a question about domain and communication. In signal processing, it is quite normal to need a negative index (autocorrelations f.x.). Ada (and I believe Pascal and Julia) has supported for specifying the indexing type, which can then be selected to match the problem domain.

google234123 6y ago
Oh god, not more inconsistency! That sounds horrible
- henrikeh 6y ago
  It really isn’t. It’s just a way of communicating the problem domain in the language. Maybe you should try it before passing judgement.
ygra 6y ago
Visual Basic’s Option Base comes to mind. And Pascal had very nice facilities for arbitrary array bases. I think you could define an array with indices from 18 to 22 is you liked, which can definitely simplify code doing the indexing.
freemint 6y ago
I don't get that 1 based indexing debate in regard to LUA and Julia. Both came up recently on hackernews. In LUA you can use the metatable functionality to implement 0 based indexes. In Julia you can overload the array access operation too. There a packages which allow zero based indexing. Or even StarWars based indexing including the machete viewing order. https://github.com/giordano/StarWarsArrays.jl https://github.com/giordano/StarWarsArrays.jl Julia's array interface has has functionality what the first/last index is, so you can use it in other peoples code. If they haer coded 1 as first index just make a pull request to fix it.
- pansa2 6y ago
  > In LUA you can use the metatable functionality to implement 0 based indexes. I tried to do that a while back and kept coming across corner cases that didn’t work. Is there a complete implementation of zero-based arrays for Lua available anywhere?

google234123 6y ago

Oh god, not more inconsistency! That sounds horrible

henrikeh 6y ago
It really isn’t. It’s just a way of communicating the problem domain in the language. Maybe you should try it before passing judgement.

ygra 6y ago

Visual Basic’s Option Base comes to mind. And Pascal had very nice facilities for arbitrary array bases. I think you could define an array with indices from 18 to 22 is you liked, which can definitely simplify code doing the indexing.

freemint 6y ago

I don't get that 1 based indexing debate in regard to LUA and Julia. Both came up recently on hackernews. In LUA you can use the metatable functionality to implement 0 based indexes. In Julia you can overload the array access operation too. There a packages which allow zero based indexing. Or even StarWars based indexing including the machete viewing order. https://github.com/giordano/StarWarsArrays.jl https://github.com/giordano/StarWarsArrays.jl Julia's array interface has has functionality what the first/last index is, so you can use it in other peoples code. If they haer coded 1 as first index just make a pull request to fix it.

pansa2 6y ago
> In LUA you can use the metatable functionality to implement 0 based indexes. I tried to do that a while back and kept coming across corner cases that didn’t work. Is there a complete implementation of zero-based arrays for Lua available anywhere?