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Comment by laichzeit0 | Hacker News Reader

Let’s not ignore the giant elephant in the room: 1-based indexing. I don’t particularly care since I use R and Python but Java, C, C/C++, C# all used 0-based indexing. It’s truly a bizarre choice Julia made there.

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You mean, the little ant on the floor?

I barfed at 1-based indexing for about a week, but now it is as natural as anything.

I would compare 0-based and 1-based indexing with whether you put semicolons at the end of each line or not. Either way doesn't really change the feel (semantics) of the language.

Also, fortan is 1-based, iirc, and a lot of numerical code is in fortan.

Oh, and many many beginning programmers and scientists have a hard time with 0-based indexing. Not sure why, but such you hear, so the choice is really not that odd.

The reason beginners have a hard time with 0 based indexing is that humans count from 1. Seriously, I've spent weeks trying to tell people "yeah, we want rows 4 and 5, so that's, uh, rows 3 and 4..." and they think it's nuts, and I now think they're right.

Right. Zero based indexing makes zero sense, unless you explain the underlying technical reason, that it’s an offset relative to a memory pointer (spend a week teaching pointers first!).

It makes sense in certain context (and in languages like C that have a low-level mental model). For scientific computing at a higher level of abstraction where the mental model of a multidimensional array is a tensor, and not a memory offset location, zero-based indices really get in the way

> Zero based indexing makes zero sense

The sensibility of the index choice is equal to the starting value of the index.

StarWars indexing makes 4 sense.

yupyupyup, you got it. :)

Precisely. Indexing makes sense in a context, and it is trivial in general to switch. This said, telling people that the first element they want is the "0th", is completely unnatural.

It really is a rather small elephant. It can be jarring at first (unless you think of R, MatLab and Bash), but then you just stop thinking about it because it legit doesn't matter.

People should stop wasting time bikeshedding this insignificant detail, but for some reason it is to programmers like a red rag to a bull.

Really its only an issue to some programmers, who prefer specific languages.

When you have to deal with a wide range of languages, stuff like this is small potatoes, compared to, say, indentation based structure. The latter can result in the completely non-obvious change of program flow due to a single errant space or tab.

You can turn any 1 based array into a 0 based array using a wrapper type that just gets inlined away.

Also have a look at https://github.com/giordano/StarWarsArrays.jl

Mose Giordano hit the nail on the head with this one. Who cares about 1 vs 0 based indices? If anything its a silly and minor design decision.

I worry about someones ability to solve real problems in any language if they can't get their head around an +1/-1 when indexing into an array.

> I worry about someones ability to solve real problems in any language if they can't get their head around an +1/-1 when indexing into an array.

This. Think about what this signals to employers and interviewers if someone throws a hissyfit over this.

1-based indexing makes sense to computational scientists (target audience). Fortran, Matlab, etc. make very good use of that. Moreover, you can change to zero based if you wish.

So this "very big elephant" is, in reality, a nothingburger.

For me, the very big elephant in the room is the semantic formatting. It has and continues to trip me up time and again. A touch of a space bar can change the flow of a python program. That is a huge asteroid of a problem.

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