In response to my question, thanks Colin for being the first devil's
advocate for 1-based indexes.

Possibly I am wrong about 0 being the norm.  Please enlighten me.  I was
only going on ubiqitous languages like C++, C#, Java & Javascript.

Would you also please justify your claim " It is a very poor choice".

Sure we can skip the first memory cell in $0.02 per meg RAM; but why is 0
poor wrt 1?  What's wrong with -1 then?

Respectfully, Justin Johansson


At 05:48 PM 20/05/2008 +0100, you wrote:
>Zero is NOT the norm for modern programming languages. It might well
>be for ancient ones. It is a very poor choice, justifiable only when
>trying to squeeze the last ounce of speed in a highly
>numerically-intensive application.
>
>And even there it is not justified - you simply use data structures
>that have an unused first element, and so avoid the subtract one
>operation in that way.