alt Hacker News> Yes 1-based indexing is a mistake. It leads to significantly less elegant code - especially for generic code - and is no harder to understand than 1-based indexing for people capable of programming.
Some would argue that 0-based indexing is significantly less elegant for numerical/scientific code, but that depends on whether they come from a MATLAB/Fortran or Python/C(++) background.
A decision was made to target the MATLAB/Fortran (and unhappy? Python/C++) crowd first, thus the choice of 1-based indexing and column-major order, but at the end of the day it's a matter of personal preference.
0-based indexing would have made it easier to reach a larger audience, however.
> and is no harder to understand than 1-based indexing for people capable of programming.
The same could be said the other way around ;-)
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Aside from the fact that 1-based indexing is better for scientific code (see Fortran), I don’t think that it matters very often. I don’t think that any Julia program I’ve ever written would need to change if Julia adopted 0-based tomorrow. You don’t typically write C-style loops in Julia; you use array functions and operators, and if you need to iterate you write `for i in array ...`. If you really need the first or last element you write `a[begin]` or `a[end]`.
Heh. I grew up writing C code and had real trouble adapting to Matlab's 1-based indexing. Much later I tried Python and was constantly confused by 0-based indexing.
I don't think one is better than the other but my mind is currently wired to see indexing with base 1.
Then there's Option Base 1 in VBA if you don't like the default behavior. Perfect for creating subtle off-by-one bugs.