this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
940 points (96.8% liked)
Programmer Humor
20499 readers
1393 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How is arrays starting at 1 still a controversial take. Arrays should start at 1 and offsets at 0.
Arrays are address offsets.
Not in languages where you don't manually handle memory, such as PHP, SQL, Python... Higher-level languages using 0-indexed arrays are letting the abstraction leak.
So what's 0 do then? I'm okay with wacky indexes (I've used something with negative indexes for a end-index shorthand) but 0 has to mean something that's actually useful. Using the index as the offset into the array seems to be the most useful way to index them.
I'd say the index is actually an offset is a reasoning for explaining why it should start at 1. If index was an index, I'd just start at 1.
I don't think any one is better than the other, but history chose 0.
That you can choose it in VB is probably the worst option :D
I can't believe an objectively true claim gets downvoted.