Arrays not starting at 1 bother me. I think the entrenched 0-based index is more important than any major push to use 1 instead, but if I could go back in time and change it I would.
It was not randomly decided. Even before arrays as a language concept existed, you would just store objects in continuous memory.
To access you would do $addr+0, $addr+1 etc. The index had to be zero-based or you would simply waste the first address.
Then in languages like C that just got a little bit of syntactic sugar where the ‘[]’ operator is a shorthand for that offset. An array is still just a memory address (i.e. a pointer).
Arrays not starting at 1 bother me. I think the entrenched 0-based index is more important than any major push to use 1 instead, but if I could go back in time and change it I would.
It really doesn’t make sense to start at 1 as the value is really the distance from the start and would screw up other parts of indexing and counters.
It doesn’t make sense that the fourth element is element number 3 either.
Ultimately it’s just about you being used to it.
It would screw up existing code but doing [array.length() -1] is pretty stupid.
For i = 0; I < array.length; i++
i < array.lengthor else you overflow.A lot of languages have a
.last()or negative indexer ([-1]) to get the last item though.Yeah, but if we went back and time and changed it then there wouldn’t be other stuff relying on it being 0-based.
It was not randomly decided. Even before arrays as a language concept existed, you would just store objects in continuous memory.
To access you would do $addr+0, $addr+1 etc. The index had to be zero-based or you would simply waste the first address.
Then in languages like C that just got a little bit of syntactic sugar where the ‘[]’ operator is a shorthand for that offset. An array is still just a memory address (i.e. a pointer).