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Comment by krallja | Hacker News Reader

I'm very impressed by the comparison between 0-indexing and radixes.

Even in the real world starting at 0 makes is more logical: in France the ground floor is 0 which works well with underground floors but in the US it's a bit weird to go from 1 to -1 directly.

It also means you don't have to do math to figure out how many flights of stairs you will be climbing!

Calculating these multidimensional indexes seems to be the major or even the only reason I've ever come across for having 0-based arrays. But it's a pretty big reason.

Hmm, I don't know directly about arrays. But for indexing into a linked list 0-based just seems to make the mest sense---if you interpret the index as "how many pointer do I have to chase?".

And giving arrays the same treatment then seems reasonable for consistency?

I always saw 0-based indices as offsets. Ie like their C interpretation, where a[i] is defined to be the same as * (a+i), not the less natural *(a+i+1).

But I can see some points for 1 based indexing, too.

(Anecdote from university: the math faculty had a building that started numbering the ground floor as -1. Perhaps just to one up (or is that one down?) the computer scientists who always feel smug about counting from 0.)

That anecdote reminds me of the classic solution to the zero-versus-one-indexing fights in the Lua community: clearly the solution is to compromise! :)

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2006-05/msg00281.html

"multidimensional indexes" sounds like something obscure and rarely used. But plain-old Decimals are a special case of this, and people use Decimals every day.

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