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I've come to feel that "arrays are pointers with offsets" is a largely-irrelevant justification for promoting zero-based indexes in today's programming landscap
by spiffytech 6y ago
I've come to feel that "arrays are pointers with offsets" is a largely-irrelevant justification for promoting zero-based indexes in today's programming landscape. Looking at the TIOBE top 10 programming languages for this month, 6 of 10 languages don't even offer a way to address memory with numeric pointers (and that climbs to 8/10 if you rule .NET as "pointers are technically available, but not commonly used and are somewhat discouraged").
If I grab JS/Java/Python/PHP, an array/list is a magic sequence of values with opaque under-the-hood operations, and my only interface to it is the item index. In that context, promoting idioms because they make mechanical sense in a language I'm not using doesn't seem compelling.