7 Jun
2017
7 Jun
'17
11:59 p.m.
On 7 Jun 2017, at 13:56, shawn wilson <ag4ve.us(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I learned the other day that array indexes in some languages start at 1 instead of 0.
This seems to be an old trend that changed around the 70s? Who started this? Why was the
change made?
I was going to make the obvious glib comment about languages which care more about some
transient notion of efficiency than usability leading to 0-based indexing.
But I think in fact it must be cultural: FORTRAN was historically 1-based, of course, and
although it looks like LISP 1 (1960) didn't have arrays, LISP 1.5 (1962) *did*, and
they were 0-based. It looks to me like ALGOL 58 allowed you to define lower & upper
bounds, based on
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/report/Algol58_prelimina…
So I suspect that languages designed by and for people who actually did a lot of numerical
matrix manipulation (ie applied mathematicians, physicists &c) used the conventions of
those fields, which were and are 1-based indexing; languages designed by & for formal
CS people tended to use zero-based, and languages designed by people who were feeling
their oats as regards flexibility allowed user-defined bounds.
--tim