3 ms·

It's not counter-intuitive at all, it only seems that way because people are now used to languages with zero-based indexing. That's almost entirely because of t

It's not counter-intuitive at all, it only seems that way because people are now used to languages with zero-based indexing. That's almost entirely because of the C language, which used pointer offset arithmetic with its arrays. Outside of that machine context, where an array is a contiguous block of RAM that can be indexed with memory pointers, there's no particular reason to do offset indexing. 1-based works just fine - "first element, second element" - works just fine and is perfectly intuitive. Different types of indexing can make sense in different situations. Some languages even allow that. In Ada, for example, arrays can start at whatever index you define.

IshKebab 2y ago
> 1-based works just fine It really doesn't. You can make it work obviously but you end up with much less elegant code, with +1 and -1 all over the place. E.g. for accessing a row of a matrix you get [width(i-1)+1, widthi+1) instead of the far saner [widthi, (width+1)i) Generic code also becomes much more awkward.
- antonvs 2y ago
  Both are less elegant in different scenarios. In many business scenarios with zero-based indexes, you need i+1 everywhere because no-one talks about the e.g. the zeroth year of a company's operation. Neither is a true one-size-fits-all solution. They're different kinds of indexes that serve different purposes. The choice of zero-based everywhere is an engineering tradeoff, nothing more.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    > In many business scenarios with zero-based indexes, you need i+1 everywhere because no-one talks about the e.g. the zeroth year of a company's operation. Perhaps, but this is extremely rare compared to tasks that are far more elegant with 0-based indexing. Also the worst you can get there is a single +1 in the display code, while trying to shoe-horn algorithms into 1-based code can get much more awkward.
demurgos 2y ago
There are reasons unrelated to pointer implementations such as the interval argument from Dijkstra's article or conversions between flat and multidimensional array indexes. There's a reason why most mathematical sequences start at zero: it leads to simpler expressions. Vec (and especially matrix) indexing should have been zero-based.

IshKebab 2y ago

> 1-based works just fine It really doesn't. You can make it work obviously but you end up with much less elegant code, with +1 and -1 all over the place. E.g. for accessing a row of a matrix you get [width(i-1)+1, widthi+1) instead of the far saner [widthi, (width+1)i) Generic code also becomes much more awkward.

antonvs 2y ago
Both are less elegant in different scenarios. In many business scenarios with zero-based indexes, you need i+1 everywhere because no-one talks about the e.g. the zeroth year of a company's operation. Neither is a true one-size-fits-all solution. They're different kinds of indexes that serve different purposes. The choice of zero-based everywhere is an engineering tradeoff, nothing more.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  > In many business scenarios with zero-based indexes, you need i+1 everywhere because no-one talks about the e.g. the zeroth year of a company's operation. Perhaps, but this is extremely rare compared to tasks that are far more elegant with 0-based indexing. Also the worst you can get there is a single +1 in the display code, while trying to shoe-horn algorithms into 1-based code can get much more awkward.

demurgos 2y ago

There are reasons unrelated to pointer implementations such as the interval argument from Dijkstra's article or conversions between flat and multidimensional array indexes. There's a reason why most mathematical sequences start at zero: it leads to simpler expressions. Vec (and especially matrix) indexing should have been zero-based.