[LoSboccacc]

_It used to be popular, and still is in some circles, to debate whether programming languages ought start array indexing at 0 or 1_

this is an exemplary case of citation needed if I ever saw one. maybe it's a valid debate for programming languages that doesn't allow people to do pointer arithmetic, which already restrict the field a lot, but even then that's sound as part of the 4GL bullshit that never really took off, and for good reasons

[beagle3]

I don't know what kind of citation would satisfy you. These debates still come up in e.g. the Lua (1-based) mailing list, and used to be everywhere.

Visual Basic had the "OPTION BASE" statement to select.[0] (Many other versions of basic did too)

APL also has the ⎕IO Index Origin setting [1]

If you want to see a lively debate, there's c2[2], and there's also Dijkstra[3]

[0] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa266179%28v=vs.60%...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_syntax_and_symbols

[2] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ZeroAndOneBasedIndexes

[3] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF

[patal]

I like Mike Hoye's historical treatise of 0 vs 1 based indexing in [0.5]. A very interesting read in several ways. It subsumes:

[...] before pointers, structs, C and Unix existed, at a time when other languages with a lot of resources and (by the standard of the day) user populations behind them were one- or arbitrarily-indexed, somebody decided that the right thing was for arrays to start at zero.

[...] the technical reason we started counting arrays at zero is that in the mid-1960’s, you could shave a few cycles off of a program’s compilation time on an IBM 7094. The social reason is that we had to save every cycle we could, because if the job didn’t finish fast it might not finish at all and you never know when you’re getting bumped off the hardware because the President of IBM just called and fuck your thesis, it’s yacht-racing time.

[0.5] http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2013/10/22/citation-needed/

[ajanuary]

> sound as part of the 4GL bullshit

Actually it's primarily early languages plus Lua.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_la...

[nfoz]

The Math-DSL's like Matlab, Julia, and Mathematica would like to chime in and say 1-based indexing translates better with math research/lit.

[JoshTriplett]

Sometimes; other times math desperately wants indexes to start at 0 for the same "offset" reasons, to avoid having to add one. If you're using indexes as subscripts, some formulas start subscripting at 0. If you're building a series, many series start indexing at 0, not least of which because you often want the first term to involve a 0 in the exponent to make a constant term. Polynomial powers start at 0. 0 is a more common bound for integrals than 1. Angles start at 0. Physics values start at 0.

If anything, mathematics provides as much of a reason as pointer arithmetic to start indexing at 0. Indexing from 1 occurs more if you're creating a one-to-one correspondence with some real-world object, and you want to number those objects starting from 1, perhaps because that's a convenient user-visible numbering.