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> I have never found anyone who found 0-based indexing natural or intuitive. It is pretty intuitive when thinking about natural numbers as steps along a path.
by jlg23 6y ago
> I have never found anyone who found 0-based indexing natural or intuitive.
It is pretty intuitive when thinking about natural numbers as steps along a path. Then, zero is the number that means "you are already there".
- mangecoeur 6y agojust... no. We are not talking about a number line here, we are talking about array indexing. That is a list of things that you count starting from the beginning. Like, no one lines up their children and says 'here is my Zeroth child'. There is a reason that Fortran, which was designed for science and engineering, uses 1 based indexing: because it makes sense when counting things, as opposed to dealing with some internal arcana of a computer's memory model.