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Comment by fosk | Hacker News Reader

Lua is the “last standing man” now.

Every language for scientific computation uses 1-based indexes, to follow the tradition of using them in formulas. FORTRAN, APL, Julia, R, MATLAB, GNU Octane, etc.

I remember that (some versions of) BASIC back in the day had an option to switch between 1-based and 0-based indexing, to appeal to both Fortran and C folks.

In physics, relativists usually count from 0. Furthermore on the numerical side, C is at least as popular as Fortran.

Julia lets you switch the index base too.

Finally a special mention for Mathematica, which appears to be 1-based, but in fact is a thinly disguised 0-based lisp, {a,b} is just List[a,b] is really just (List a b) so of course if you want b you ask for element 2, element 0 is the head and is just List.

Numpy

Hold your horses, APL[1] is not dead yet. However, at some point in its history, APL did gain the ability to assign the Index Origin[2] to 0 if the problem called for it via:

    ⎕IO←0

0: intentionally started the indexes from 1 ;)

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_language)

2: https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Index_origin

R still uses 1 indexing, Julia as well.

And FORTRAN

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