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Comment by flubflub | Hacker News Reader

I don't think 1 based indexing is that useful. A lot of mathematics formulae start from 0 too and 1-indexing makes that more awkward.

Although I agree that some languages like Julia and say MATLAB feel more fluent to express mathematics.

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Luckily, Fortran allows easily changing from one to the other. You simply define arrays as A(1:10) or A(0:9) and they will index from 1 or 0.

You can even do arbitrary indexing: fixed like A(-3:3) or dynamically like B(n1:n2). This may sounds useless but it's actually an excellent feature when writing eg convolution kernels.

I don't know of any other languages beyond Fortran and Julia that have arbitrary array indexing as a core feature (you can fake it in C in two lines I guess).

Wow that's incredible and really changes my opinion on Julia's indexing.

It is small but really makes things more elegant. I should definitely try Julia. I've spent a lot of time calculating awkward array index conversion formulae in my head and this could make things a lot more simple especially for weird cases.

I was under the impression that Fortran's only redeeming benefit was that it compiled well for numeric computing routines.

Again, to be clear, Julia does not have arbitrary indexing as in Fortran. It has an external package that can mimic arbitrary indexing of Fortran.

That's not a meaningful distinction. Julia is a powerful enough language that OffsetArrays don't need to be built in to work perfectly. Good languages don't need everything built in.

The comment above states: "...Julia that have arbitrary array indexing as a core feature...". Is an external package written in Julia considered a "core" feature of the Julia language? Why does the Julia community always twist the facts? Why cannot they accept the facts as they are? It would not reduce the value of their efforts, I guarantee you—decency and honesty always prevail.

Julia's docs say that it supports "Julia supports arrays with arbitrary indices": https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/devdocs/offset-arrays/

So let's break that down.

The base standard library and "idiomatic" Julia are both largely written without the assumption of 1-based indexing, instead dispatching to what you think about as an array-oriented dsl, which is this interface: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/interfaces/#man-inte...

It is very normal in Julia to implement such interfaces to do what you want. Julia uses these types of internal interfaces with multimethods in lieu of a lot of compiler intrinsics.

So I would say Julia and Fortran have different implementations of arbitrary indexing.

They are both oriented around core design features of each respective language.

Yes, Julia does support arbitrary indexing because base functions are written in terms of `firstindex`, `eachindex` and `lastindex` etc.

One can see it in the implementation of `filter!` for example https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/ab4e036b9209967b4273... :

External Julia packages can impliment core features. For another example, look at StaticArrays. Fortran is a brittle old language where everything supported must be built into the language. Julia isn't.

Again, twisting facts by some Julia novice about a topic they have no familiarity with. Fortran does not require features to be built-in. Look at all the intrinsic Fortran modules. But array-based indexing IS built-in to the language. Unlike Julia, you do not have to rely on an external package for it. Perhaps the Julia community's relatively young age has made it so arrogant, Machiavellian, and fact-twisting about other languages to prove their presence here and there. Other programming communities are old enough to put decency and honesty in their core values.

I also find it interesting that you assume I'm a Julia novice. I use Julia for my job, and have a few dozen commits to Julia (and several to packages)

Julia's compiler is made to be extendable. GPUCompiler.jl which adds the .ptx compilation output for example is a package (https://github.com/JuliaGPU/GPUCompiler.jl). The package manager of Julia itself... is an external package (https://github.com/JuliaLang/Pkg.jl). The built in SuiteSparse usage? That's a package too (https://github.com/JuliaLang/SuiteSparse.jl). It's fairly arbitrary what is "external" and "internal" in a language that allows that kind of extendability. Literally the only thing that makes these packages a standard library is that they are built into and shipped with the standard system image. Do you want to make your own distribution of Julia that changes what the "internal" packages are? Here's a tutorial that shows how to add plotting to the system image (https://julialang.github.io/PackageCompiler.jl/dev/examples/...). You could setup a binary server for that and now the first time to plot is 0.4 seconds.

Julia's arrays system is built so that most arrays that are used are not the simple Base.Array. Instead Julia has an AbstractArray interface definition (https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/interfaces/#man-inte...) which the Base.Array conforms to, and many effectively standard library packages like StaticArrays.jl, OffsetArrays.jl, etc. conform to, and thus they can be used in any other Julia package, like the differential equation solvers, solving nonlinear systems, optimization libraries, etc. There is a higher chance that packages depend on these packages then that they do not. They are only not part of the Julia distribution because the core idea is to move everything possible out to packages. There's not only a plan to make SuiteSparse and sparse matrix support be a package in 2.0, but also ideas about making the rest of linear algebra and arrays themselves into packages where Julia just defines memory buffer intrinsic (with likely the Arrays.jl package still shipped with the default image). At that point, are arrays not built into the language? I can understand using such a narrow definition for systems like Fortran or C where the standard library is essentially a fixed concept, but that just does not make sense with Julia. It's inherently fuzzy.

I wasn't sure. I googled it and it was in the Julia docs but I didn't look at the details to see if it is first-class.

The fortran version is super neat, especially in conjunction with stack allocated multidimensional variable length arrays.

Much of Julia language is written in Julia. So the 'external package' is just an extension you install/use if you wish. A distinction without a difference.

Ada and many BASICs also permit using arbitrary ranges. Ada even takes it further, any range over a discrete type can work including characters and arbitrary enumerations.

Ada has adopted it from Modula-2/Pascal.

A lot of formulae start from 1 too. And in linear algebra, most of them do.

It's like driving on the left side of the road instead of the right side of the road. Inconsistency is what makes it painful.

I am convinced a good fraction of the off by one errors in C like languages comes from 0 indexing. The ith element is found after traversing i+1 elements and that fact leads to mistakes all the time. With 1 indexing the numbers line up.

I agree. There's far less of a cognitive load for developers associated with representing an expression as written, if you don't need to mess with indices, in order to accommodate the language and its vagaries.

One should not need to adjust the way one expresses an algorithm, because of opinionated language design decisions. Put another way, languages designed for scientific/engineering computing won't have a hard/fixed opinion about things that shouldn't be worried about.

Indeed, polynomials, for instance, start with a power of zero. At the same time, there is a reason why the natural numbers begin with 1, and, in practical terms, there is a certain convenience in the count (size) being the same as the last index.

The natural numbers don't start with 1... The convention is inconsistent, but for many mathematicians, especially including logicians, they start with 0. It is best not to use the term "natural numbers" at all.

By the way, your point about polynomials works in favour of the convention that 0 is a natural number.

Try thinking of being the zeroth person in a line. Or your child being in the zeroth year of her life.

How many lions are in my room at the moment? Hopefully zero.

But zero sheep is not a flock.

(Besides, there's uncountably many things you have zero of in you room.)

> But zero sheep is not a flock.

So one isn't a natural number?

> (Besides, there's uncountably many things you have zero of in you room.)

;) Exactly. Zero is the most natural number.

So, on your scale, which is the first natural number?

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