3 ms·

Weird then that scientific computing languages prefer 1 based arrays. Maybe can show how it's very annoying in lots of Fortran or Julia code?

• cyberax 3y ago
  Python is as much a "scientific computing language" as anything, and it's zero-based.
  • da39a3ee 3y ago
    You haven’t shown how it’s “very annoying” in R, Fortran, and Julia.
  • goatlover 3y ago
    Not really, the core language is general purpose. It's Python's scientific libraries and ecosystem which became popular.
• mananaysiempre 3y ago
  > Weird then that scientific computing languages prefer 1 based arrays. Not really when the code is routinely transcribed from papers, and the ages-old convention throughout mathematics is one-based indexing, both bounds of the interval included. (With the notable exception of Euler’s beta and gamma functions.) Of course, in a paper intended for a human reader the occasional off-by-one error is much less dire than in code, so the author is freer to use a more error-prone convention. I once had to translate from a one-based paper to zero-based Python code (with the added bonus of different discrete Fourier conventions *shudder*), and it’s remarkably annoying even if the resulting code is more obviously correct than the paper’s original formulas.