3 ms·

I don't think 0-based was ever as common a practice as it is today, especially in the 60s. In the beginning there were two camps fighting which system was to be

I don't think 0-based was ever as common a practice as it is today, especially in the 60s. In the beginning there were two camps fighting which system was to be preferred and there were many more 1-based or agnostic languages (like the whole Pascal family). "Numerical Recipes" a pretty popular book for some time even came in two editions, a 0-based and a 1-based version. I think the victory of C had a big influence on 0-based winning. Personally I find it very sad that the agnostic approach of Pascal did not prevail. Let the programmer decide what they think fits the situation best and let the compiler deal with the technicalities. This, and I also miss range types... for like 40 years now...

IshKebab 3y ago
Surely everything was 0-based initially, when everything was written in assembly? Are there any 1-based ISAs?
- weinzierl 3y ago
  I wouldn't call assembly 0-based. Sure, the zero flag is convenient for branching on zero when counting backwards but what makes assembly 0-based apart from that? I'd say having a pointer to the first element of an array is pure convention and you could as easily point it to the imaginary element before, similar to how the program counter always points to the next imaginary instruction on most architectures.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    The offset addressing modes all start from zero. You could hack around it in some places by storing the pointer to an element before but that's clearly going against how it is intended to be used. For example if you have an array that you cast between different sized types (e.g. uint64 to uint8) then you have to change the pointer value!
Zickzack 3y ago
> Personally I find it very sad that the agnostic approach of Pascal did not prevail. Let the programmer decide what they think fits the situation best and let the compiler deal with the technicalities. This, and I also miss range types... for like 40 years now... I am with you there. However, Pascal, a toy Algol, was designed to be a language for a compiler course. It took its ideas like "where does an array start" from other Algol implementations and added a broken type system. Pascal gets the love now, as witnessed by the Lua designers referring to Pascal and not to Algol.

IshKebab 3y ago

Surely everything was 0-based initially, when everything was written in assembly? Are there any 1-based ISAs?

weinzierl 3y ago
I wouldn't call assembly 0-based. Sure, the zero flag is convenient for branching on zero when counting backwards but what makes assembly 0-based apart from that? I'd say having a pointer to the first element of an array is pure convention and you could as easily point it to the imaginary element before, similar to how the program counter always points to the next imaginary instruction on most architectures.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  The offset addressing modes all start from zero. You could hack around it in some places by storing the pointer to an element before but that's clearly going against how it is intended to be used. For example if you have an array that you cast between different sized types (e.g. uint64 to uint8) then you have to change the pointer value!

Zickzack 3y ago

> Personally I find it very sad that the agnostic approach of Pascal did not prevail. Let the programmer decide what they think fits the situation best and let the compiler deal with the technicalities. This, and I also miss range types... for like 40 years now... I am with you there. However, Pascal, a toy Algol, was designed to be a language for a compiler course. It took its ideas like "where does an array start" from other Algol implementations and added a broken type system. Pascal gets the love now, as witnessed by the Lua designers referring to Pascal and not to Algol.