3 ms·

I worked with Lua for awhile but never got over the 1-based indexing.

• soapdog 1y ago
  You very seldon need to deal with it, most of your iterators are `pairs()` or `ipairs()` anyway. I like 1-based indexing and can deal with 0-based ones without any wart. I don't really get it why people make so much fuss, but then again if you feel it is a big problem, then there are plenty of other options that will suit you better.
• cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  You'd get used to it eventually. Many of us had to go the other way. I grew up with BASIC and Wirth languages (Pascal, Modula-2, etc) that were 1-indexed and to this day even after 25, 30 years of working professionally in 0-based indexed languages I still catch myself here and there having to adjust (and whiteboard coding can sometimes throw me off under pressure), but clearly operate just fine. I worked briefly professionally in Julia a couple years ago, which is 1-indexed, and I found it an easy transition, really. Many scientific computing things are 1-indexed, as Fortran was, too, among other reasons. My own project is a rewrite / defibrilation of the 1990s LambdaMOO server (https://codeberg.org/timbran/moor/ https://codeberg.org/timbran/moor/), which had its own OO programming language that was 1-indexed. It's just not as "weird" as people think, I think it's just a generation of people grew up with C-derived languages and have grown to expect 0 as "normal" when it's really just "accident of history/popularity". I don't think it's objectionable that Lua chose 1-indexing, it is actually more "friendly" to newcomers to programming.
  • pklausler 1y ago
    As Fortran is, not was.
    • cmrdporcupine 1y ago
      Yeah fair enough. I was speaking more about historic influence. Fortran is still extensively used, but it was more influential 40 years ago than it is now.