OpenEuphoria

Re: 0-based Indexing

• Posted by dm31 at uow.edu.au Jul 17, 2003
• 493 views

>From: "C. K. Lester" <cklester at yahoo.com>  

>Derek splained (snippage occurred):
>
>> > I don't get it. Why do some languages use 0-based 
indexing? It's got to
>be
>> > the dumbest thing in programming language history. Or 
maybe not.
>> >
>> The index is actually an offset from an address.
>
>Okay, I get that... and that's reasonable for the behind-the-
scenes data
>manipulation, but why not hide that detail and use 1-based 
indexing? Is it
>that much of a performance issue? Like Greg said, 1-based 
indexing is more
>intuitive, easier to read and understand...

Well, for me personally (maybe because I'm use to programming 
in C/C++/ASM) 0-based is easier and more understandable. 
Also, for example. say I want to use 1 byte of storage as my 
index var. If I start at 0, I get from 0-255 different 
elements, whereas if I used 1-base then I could only get 1-
255.

Having 0-based makes some algo's cleaner to write, and more 
effiecent. (in above example use a 256 length array, I only 
need 1 byte for 0-based, and 2 bytes for 1-based. Not much of 
a difference, but I'm a large program with many of those it 
would)

Cheers,
Dan