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My first boss who started in the late 60's said 1 based indexing exists because the early programmers with mathematics training thought ordinary people are too
by Gibbon1 2y ago
My first boss who started in the late 60's said 1 based indexing exists because the early programmers with mathematics training thought ordinary people are too stupid to get zero based indexing.
- IshKebab 2y agoYeah I think that's the only plausible reason. Quite patronising but I think it probably came from an honest "make programming more accessible to non-programmers" place. They just forgot that the rest of programming exists... You see that in books and papers and tutorials a lot. They'll explain some basic concepts nicely and then realise that they can't really explain ELI5 calculus and skip straight into Laplace transforms. I once read a highly technical manual for a SystemVerilog simulator that began by explaining what double-clicking was. No joke. That's basically 1-based indexing.