You Are WRONG About 0 Based Indexing

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[catastrophicblues]

This is why you should use -1 based indexing like DreamBerd.

[mgdotdev]

Imagine going to a conference in person, to see a speaker lecture in person

and still watching a recording

[heyrim]

Fun fact already on minute two.

In Germany we are actually counting floors starting with a a zero floor. "Erdgeschoss": ground floor, "1. Etage" is up one level from ground floor (and now I am already confused what it is in English). So 0 based index systems have been working well for a couple hundred years.

[aesp]

The concept of 'nothing' or 'zero' definitely existed. They just didn't have agreement on how it worked in math (or a system to use it effectively).

[Lolimov]

Prime at its Prime. I felt the emotions in the end. This is a man truly talking about what is important to him and he does not hide his feelings about this. I admire this fucking guy.

[ZingsVideos]

0 makes sense because it's an offset. If you want someone to stand still, you don't tell them to walk 1 mile.

[tinnguyen]

0 base array works great with modulo arithmetic.

[asdfghyter]

my favorite example of 1-based indexing is used where it makes zero sense is intervals in music. if you add together two third intervals you get a fifth interval. 3+3=5. 5+4=8.

the first interval, the unison, is a zero offset

[pokefreak]

1-based gets nasty the moment you need to do any index arithmetic.
Like let's say you have a pixel array of WxH pixels and you need to generate an index given x and y. With 0-based thats just "x + W * y", while with 1-based it becomes "x + W * (y-1)"

I can't think of any code where 1-based is better beyond it being slightly more intuitive for beginners.

[chi_said_hi]

The problem with 1-based is that when you do modulo and integer divide operations, there's a missmatch in indexing. Like if you have an array of 20 items and you want to associate them evenly for like 1000 elements, you'd do items[i % items.length()], this way, it'll always be contained within items. But with 1-indexing, item[40 % 20] = item[0], which would error out.

[primbin_]

1-based indexing is significantly worse for higher dimensional arrays.

If I have a cubic 3-dimensional grid of width 16, its way more intuitive to index it like this (0-based):
grid[x + y*16 + z*256]

As opposed to this (1-based):
grid[x + (y-1)*16 + (z-1)*256]

[Rikaisan]

I don't know how I feel about live reactions, it's just...
If I ever go to a Primeagen event, I would like him to talk about something himself, just like the course he made for Frontend Masters

[pqnet]

in C the third element of an array is not at a+2, it is between a+2 and a+3. The address point at the start of the object. x[n] refers to the object that is in the memory range between addresses x+n and x+n+1. Once you start giving addresses to the gaps between bytes and not to the bytes themselves everything makes a lot of sense.

[johnathanrhoades]

I do a lot with SQL. It’s 1 indexed. I think it makes sense for the stuff you do with SQL.
For anything that needs math, actual locations, modulus operator, etc., I am all for 0 index.

Also, thanks for the closing thoughts! No one looking at you now would guess what you had to go through to get to where you are.

[lifeisfakenews]

"Lua is actually right"
alr fine, ill hear you out but i doubt you will convince me

[Oler-yxxj]

Tom Scott in his "bodge" video was using lua, it went exactly the way one would expect

[biggerdoofus]

As soon as he mentioned the c specification I paused to look it up. C99, c-11, and c-17 all refer to square brackets as subscripting operators, but also refer to the elements of an initializer list as being "indexed". Further, c-2x (since at least August 2022) has all that plus the explicit mention of 0-indexing in relation to bits in the stdbit.h section. Also _Lua_ stores the array portion of tables in an actual c array.

..Counter-ackshually-d.

[epiphaeny]

I was coding many years in Matlab (1-based index) and now programming in C++ (0-based, you know...). 1-based index feels indeed more natural for counting, but 0-based index is MUCH more convenient when you do modulo operations. With 1-based indices, you basically always convert your index to a 0-based index, do the modulo operation and than convert it back to a 1-based index. So annoying.... The counting "issue" with 0-based can be fixed relatively easy with ranged-base loops (or STL algorithms).

[MasterHigure]

As a mathematician, some times it's more sensible to start a sequence at 0 (such as a geometric sequence, where the index tells you the power of the common quotient), some times it's more sensible to start a sequence at 1 (such as the harmonic sequence where the index tells you the denominator).

It's the fact that programming languages can't be flexible about it that's the real issue here.

[thomassynths]

Edgar Dijkstra wrote a great short paper explaining why 0-based is intrinsically better.
Source: EWD831 "Why numbering should start at zero"