7 Jun
2017
7 Jun
'17
6:31 p.m.
Basically, until C came along, the standard practice
was for indices
to start at 1. Certainly Fortran and Pascal did it that way. I suspect
that all the Algol family languages did too, but I only did a little
Algol W programming in colledge and that was long ago. I think Cobol also.
APL (excepting some early implementations) lets you set the "index origin"
to either 0 or 1, either by assigning a value to the quad-IO system
variable, or through the ')ORIGIN' command (varies with the
implementation).
Changing quad-IO inside a function at runtime was a trick used to inflict
endless terror on many a first-year undergrad ;-)
--lyndon