Lots of systems I grew up with were 1-indexed and there's nothing wrong with it. In the context of history, C is the anomaly.
I learned the Wirth languages first (and then later did a lot of programming in MOO, a prototype OO 1-indexed scripting language). Because of that early experience I still slip up and make off by 1 errors occasionally w/ 0 indexed languages.
(Actually both Modula-2 and Ada aren't strictly 1 indexed since you can redefine the indexing range.)
It's fine, I can see the advantages. I just think it's a weird level of blindness to act like 1 indexing is some sort of aberration. It's really not. It's actually quite friendly for new or casual programmers, for one.
I think the objection is not so much blindness as the idea that professional tools should not generally be tailored to the needs of new or casual users at the expense of experienced users.
Is there any actual evidence that new programmers really find this hard? Python is renowned for being beginner friendly and I've never heard of anyone suggesting it was remotely a problem.
There are only a few languages that are purely for beginners (LOGO and BASIC?) so it's a high cost to annoy experienced programmers for something that probably isn't a big deal anyway.
I think the claim might harken back to the days when programming was a new thing and mathematicians,physicists,etc were the ones most often getting started at it, if they had by training gotten used to 1 based indexing in mathematics it was probably a bit of a pain to adapt (and why R and Matlab,etc use 1-based indexing).
Thus, 1 probably wasn't "easier", it just adhered to an existing orthodoxy that "beginners" came from at the time.
> Lots of systems I grew up with were 1-indexed and there's nothing wrong with it. In the context of history, C is the anomaly.
The problem is that Lua is effectively an embedded language for C.
If Lua never interacted with C, 1-based indexing would merely be a weird quirk. Because you are constantly shifting across the C/Lua barrier, 1-based indices becomes a disaster.
Pascal, frankly, allowed to index arrays by any enumerable type; you could use Natural (1-based), or could use 0..whatever. Same with Modula-2; writing it, I freely used 0-based indexing when I wanted to interact with hardware where it made sense, and 1-based indexes when I wanted to implement some math formula.
As I understand it Julia changed course and is attempting to support arbitrary index ranges, a feature which Fortran enjoys. (I'm not clear on the details as I don't use either of them.)
There was no change of course. Julia's AbstractArray interface requirements are just agnostic about array start indices. we have packages (e.g. OffsetArrays.jl) for arbitrary index ranges and that has existed for a long time.
If anything, the only significant change is that the community is becoming more and more convinced that offset array support is a bit of a footgun and makes it easy for bugs to sneak into generic code.
Let’s hope that they don’t also replicate ISO Fortran’s design flaws with lower array bounds, which contain enough pitfalls and portability problems that I don’t recommend their use.
I haven't used either language much myself and I thought the feature looked brilliant so I'd be very curious to know what sort of issues you ran into in practice.
Lately, yes, Julia and R.
Lots of systems I grew up with were 1-indexed and there's nothing wrong with it. In the context of history, C is the anomaly.
I learned the Wirth languages first (and then later did a lot of programming in MOO, a prototype OO 1-indexed scripting language). Because of that early experience I still slip up and make off by 1 errors occasionally w/ 0 indexed languages.
(Actually both Modula-2 and Ada aren't strictly 1 indexed since you can redefine the indexing range.)
It's funny how orthodoxies grow.