This website contains age-restricted materials including nudity and explicit depictions of sexual activity.
By entering, you affirm that you are at least 18 years of age or the age of majority in the jurisdiction you are accessing the website from and you consent to viewing sexually explicit content.
Yeah, but if we went back and time and changed it then there wouldn’t be other stuff relying on it being 0-based.
It was not randomly decided. Even before arrays as a language concept existed, you would just store objects in continuous memory.
To access you would do $addr+0, $addr+1 etc. The index had to be zero-based or you would simply waste the first address.
Then in languages like C that just got a little bit of syntactic sugar where the ‘[]’ operator is a shorthand for that offset. An array is still just a memory address (i.e. a pointer).
I know. But in the alternate reality where we’d been using 1-based indices forever you’d be telling me how useful it is that the first element is “1” instead of zero and I’d be saying there are some benefits to using zero based index because it’s more like an offset than an index.
A lot of mathematical languages start from 1: R, Julia, Mathematica (and also Lua and Fish).
I don’t know why, but in, e.g. R, it doesn’t bother me, I get caught by it in Lua all the time.
I suppose it’s a function of how far the array is abstracted from being pointers to an address that makes it easier to mentally switch.