this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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Arrays not starting at 1 bother me. I think the entrenched 0-based index is more important than any major push to use 1 instead, but if I could go back in time and change it I would.
It really doesn't make sense to start at 1 as the value is really the distance from the start and would screw up other parts of indexing and counters.
It would screw up existing code but doing [array.length() -1] is pretty stupid.
A lot of languages have a
.last()or negative indexer ([-1]) to get the last item though.For i = 0; I < array.length; i++
Casually throws in capitals as well.
My post is a work of fiction
i < array.lengthor else you overflow.It doesn't make sense that the fourth element is element number 3 either.
Ultimately it's just about you being used to it.
Yeah, but if we went back and time and changed it then there wouldn't be other stuff relying on it being 0-based.
It was not randomly decided. Even before arrays as a language concept existed, you would just store objects in continuous memory.
To access you would do $addr+0, $addr+1 etc. The index had to be zero-based or you would simply waste the first address.
Then in languages like C that just got a little bit of syntactic sugar where the '[]' operator is a shorthand for that offset. An array is still just a memory address (i.e. a pointer).
I know. But in the alternate reality where we'd been using 1-based indices forever you'd be telling me how useful it is that the first element is "1" instead of zero and I'd be saying there are some benefits to using zero based index because it's more like an offset than an index.
A lot of mathematical languages start from 1: R, Julia, Mathematica (and also Lua and Fish).
I don't know why, but in, e.g. R, it doesn't bother me, I get caught by it in Lua all the time.
I suppose it's a function of how far the array is abstracted from being pointers to an address that makes it easier to mentally switch.