Not to mention the 1-based indexing sin. JavaScript has a lot of WTFs but they got that right at least.
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.
There are only a few languages that are purely for beginners (LOGO and BASIC?) so it's a high cost to annoy experienced programmers for something that probably isn't a big deal anyway.
Thus, 1 probably wasn't "easier", it just adhered to an existing orthodoxy that "beginners" came from at the time.
If anything, the only significant change is that the community is becoming more and more convinced that offset array support is a bit of a footgun and makes it easy for bugs to sneak into generic code.
The problem is that Lua is effectively an embedded language for C.
If Lua never interacted with C, 1-based indexing would merely be a weird quirk. Because you are constantly shifting across the C/Lua barrier, 1-based indices becomes a disaster.
[Documents]$ cat test.js
let testArray = [];
testArray[0] = "foo";
testArray["0"] = "bar";
console.log(testArray[0]);
console.log(testArray["0"]);
[Documents]$ jsc test.js
bar bar
[Documents]$[edit]
let testArray = [];
testArray[0] = "foo";
testArray["0"] = "bar";
testArray["00"] = "baz";
console.log(testArray[0]);
console.log(testArray["0"]);
console.log(testArray["00"]);- Every property access in JavaScript is semantically coerced to a string (or a symbol, as of ES6). All property keys are semantically either strings or symbols.
- Property names that are the ToString() of a 31-bit unsigned integer are considered indexes for the purposes of the following two behaviours:
- For arrays, indexes are the elements of the array. They’re the properties that can affect its `length` and are acted on by array methods.
- Indexes are ordered in numeric order before other properties. Other properties are in creation order. (In some even nicher cases, property order is implementation-defined.)
{ let a = {}; a['1'] = 5; a['0'] = 6; Object.keys(a) }
// ['0', '1']
{ let a = {}; a['1'] = 5; a['00'] = 6; Object.keys(a) }
// ['1', '00'] function f1() end
function f2() end
local m1 = {}
local m2 = {}
local obj = {
[f1] = 1,
[f2] = 2,
[m1] = 3,
[m2] = 4,
}
print(obj[f1], obj[f2], obj[m1], obj[m2], obj[{}])
What you say is true for languages that don't have collections, real arrays, or vectors, only memory ranges. This is the case of C, but not Fortran, Pascal, or Ada. So yeah, if all you have is a hammer, you'd better use 0-based nails; hopefully, though, we'll allow for non-hammer tools in popular toolboxes sometime this century.