This indeed is not Algol (or rather C) heritage, but Fortran heritage, not memory offsets but indices in mathematical formulae. This is why R and Julia also have 1-based indexing.

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cmrdporcupine 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Pascal. Modula-2. BASIC. Hell, Logo.

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.

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teo_zero 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In fact zero-based has shown some undeniable advantages over one-based. I couldn't explain it better than Dijkstra's famous essay: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF

	▲	cmrdporcupine 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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nine_k 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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IshKebab 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And MATLAB. Doesn't make it any better that other languages have the same mistake.