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Comment by yoodenvranx | Hacker News Reader

As someone who does quite a lot of image and signal processing the fact that their arrays are 1-based is a complete deal breaker. The first few years of my career I worked with Matlab and I hated 1-based arrays with a passion. I think I never encountered a situation where the Matlab way makes stuff easier, almost always the 0-based index is the more natural choice.

After I switched to Python/C I can say that I never want to work with 1-index languages again.

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I've always had a very hard time understanding how someone can do something requiring a high level of abstraction (programming), but cannot subtract one. It's simply amazing.

I've used several languages in both camps, and you know what? When I'm in Matlab I start my indeces at 1, and in C i start at 0. Who would have thought it would be that simple!

I just cannot comprehend how anyone can use 1-based indexing. I have never used it myself though so there's always the possibility that I may just be missing out on something. Glad that you cleared this up.

Because index sets in mathematics are typically indexed beginning at 1? The most notable, and relevant, being indexing in matrices

I just can't comprehend how something as trivial as indexing can be a deal-breaker for someone. I write 0-based most of the time, but I can think of as many advantages for 1-based indexing as I can for 0-based. The only time I can understand prefering 0-based is in C or something of a similar level, where indexing is just syntactic sugar for pointer arithmetic.

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