[Skeime]

Dijkstra is right, of course. However, most math texts still use 1-based indexing. If you want to translate them into code, it's easier when the conventions match.

(Now, if you had a proposal for switching math over to 0-based indexing ...)

[toolslive]

He (Dijkstra) even mentions this in the article:

> The above has been triggered by a recent incident, when, in an emotional outburst, one of my mathematical colleagues at the University —not a computing scientist— accused a number of younger computing scientists of "pedantry" because —as they do by habit— they started numbering at zero.

[scheme271]

Good luck getting a community with literally hundreds of years of literature using 1 based indexing to change.

[Skeime]

I did have one or two math professors who would use x_0 and x_1 instead of x_1 and x_2 when they had to name two objects.

But I have also seen places where 1-based indexing was used despite being "obviously wrong". I don't quite recall what it was, but there was sequence of objects A_1, A_2, ... and a natural way of combining A_k and A_l to get A_(k + l - 1). Had the indices been shifted by 1 to be 0-based, the result would have been A_(k + l), which would be much nicer to work with.