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by scheme271 267 days ago
Good luck getting a community with literally hundreds of years of literature using 1 based indexing to change.
1 comments

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.