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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Just like big- vs. little endian issue, the differences matter less than everyone adopting one. When you program having two code sets with different base of indexing is several times worse than either alone.

0-based indexing is here. 1-based has no benefit. New languages should use 0-based indexing.

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Fortran predates C, so 1-based indexing has been “here” arguably longer than 0-based indexing. Most languages targeted at numerical computing use 1-based indexing because mathematics uses 1-based indexing in linear algebra. That seems like a huge benefit to me! C has 0-based indexing precisely because it doesn’t have genuine multi-dimensional arrays and has to use pointer arithmetics instead (which in my opinion makes it a very bad fit for scientific computing)

Mathematicians can, and do, use both, and would arguably be better of with 0-based. Mathematicians sometimes need to use partitioned matrices, and describing the start and end indices of those partitions goes better with 0-based indexing of matrix elements, so that the top left element is at 0,0. It's horrible if you have to work with such things in 1-index based matlab, the amount of nested +1 and -1 corrections you need to type...

0-based indexing was "here" long before C was created.

Lisp or Algol are more or less contemporary to Fortran. The former uses 0-based indexing, the latter can use arbitrary bounds. As does Fortran at least since the seventies, by the way.

I like Ada's indexing range types, if you do it the right way your arrays can be 0-index or 1-index or indexed from 23 to 149. The bottomline is that in a good language it shouldn't matter and the programmer shouldn't even know how the compiler indexes the data. You iterate from array'first to array'last.

I do prefer 0-based indexing, of course, but often using indices can and should be avoided anyway.

Or indexed by any discrete type with a defined order, including enums and negative numbers. The latter being quite useful for signal processing.

Another thing to the add to the list of good ideas in Ada everyone ought to copy.

Ada ranges are closed intervals and need +1/-1 tweaks to handle a set of ranges.

This is where I land. Anyone arguing one way or the other tends to make up some arbitrary reason or impose assumptions on the implementation of the language. They are both perfectly fine and logical numbering systems, however since 95% of developers expect a 0-based numbering system, that is what we should use.

This ignores the fact that people use different languages for different purposes. More people use Excel, which is 1-based, than all other languages combined. Should Excel be 0-based because people who use C (a much smaller minority) prefer their language to be 0-based?

I'm pretty sure 1-based indexing is here too. Should new languages use it?

Fortran was using 1-based indexing 15 years before C existed if I understand correctly?

Yes! And it's not a coincidence Fortran was conceived to target scientists, while C was targeting kernel developers. The target audience had much to do with the choice.

It's also funny that a new language like Julia chose to go the 1-based route. https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/558

It seems clearly the motivation was to be in line with other mathematical languages. But then time and again I see people say Julia is supposed to replace Python in the future. Well, you've just set yourself up for a little fight there because I'd say the vast majority of programmers are used to 0-based by default, and they're not going to dick around and install packages and crap to change that default behaviour, least of all when trying to be convinced that some new language is superior.

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