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but since we are moving twards abstracting everything else, why can't we start counting at 1?
No longer do I argue with those that scream, "Zero!" because I've figured out that it is practically a 'religious argument'.
When I asked, "Well what do you call the first element?" and the response is "The zero-th element." (said with a straight face) it is time for me to stop wasting my breath 
I guess at some point the "group think" in the programming world became: 1-base is for noobs and real programmers use 0-base because that's what the computer does.
FWIW,
-Chris C.
P.S.
To be clear... I'm not arguing against two's compliment - I'm just arguing to start at one for high level stuff. When I need to look at the IL or machine language I can adjust my thinking.
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Well - I don't SCREAM 'zero !', but this is a theme where I underscore every's advice to learn (PURE) C first, 'cause then you know what's going on under the hood ...
As said before - for the Computer (or, in our case, the Compiler) an Index is nothing more than an OFFSET to an given address, and so the logical Index for the first element is 0.
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Actually I learned Motorolla 68000 Assembler before I learned C.
I'm saying that I should be able to start arrays at 1 and I shouldn't have to know that the computer uses offset 0 under the hood for the same reason that I shouldn't have to know that -1 is 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
And I learned C when there was just K&R 
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I thought the Option Base = 0/1 took care of this debate?
To each is own!
VB Guy
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Have you read the thread?
The question is 'should it 0 OR one' - not both ...
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Well, if you're gonna get specific. It says 0 or 1, which, when simplified, equals 1. So, the question is actually "Should array indexing start at 1?". 
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Well - I can't agree with you, 'cause I'm a logical one, and (from a logical POV) there's just the answer: start with 0 !!!
Why ? - The Index is nothing than the OFFSET from the starting point, so the first element - wich is in the starting position - has an offset of 0 from the starting position.
Everything else is just a simplification for HUMAN understanding, but against computer / algebraic logic (IMHO)
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I wasn't saying that it should start with 1. I was just trying to lighten up the discussion with a little bit of humor. If you read my post, I say the question says "should it be one"; I didn't say "it should be one".
I'm actually with you on this. I think it should start with 0 because as you said, it represents the offset from the beginning.
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Is option base available in VB.NET versions?
- Life is a fountain
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My zero'th thought was: why should I use 1 and not some other number? Just stay with zero which can express both offset from the beginning of an array and element's position.
Greetings - Jacek
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... because it indicates really advanced and complex programming.
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humm ... Starting at 90 degrees ? "Dogy style arrays" ??
2 bugs found.
> recompile ...
65534 bugs found.
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42!!!! How?
If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
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Hitch Hiker's Guid to the Galaxy - 'The answer to the life, the universe and everything is: 42' XD
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It just occurred to me.
In Australia the first level of the building is the "Ground Floor". Next level up is the First floor. So when you get in a lift, to go one level up you press "1".
Is it in the UK or USA (don't remember) where this is not the case. On ground floor, you ARE on 1st floor! If you want to go one level up you press "2".
So in Australia we use 0 based buildings! What about you?
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Confirmed. I've been to Cyprus and seen that most buildings with ground-level 0th floor (usually non-living) and -1 for basement/parking/tech/etc.
In Russia 99.9999% buildings have floor count starting from 1. I like the 0th floor idea better.
in another thousand years we'll be machines or gods█
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Italy has 0 based buildings. As the most of Europe.
In London I foud high building with no 13 and 17...
Some airplane are 3-based (there is no 1 & 2: probably are the toilets) and skip 17 ...
2 bugs found.
> recompile ...
65534 bugs found.
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<small>Kamran Behzad wrote:
In Australia the first level of the building is the "Ground Floor". Next level up is the First floor.</small>
In the US, generally the floor you walk in on is 1, the one above you is 2, etc.
There seems to be a growing trend to have a star beside the elevator button that most people will think is the "main" floor (generally a lobby).
If there are multiple floors below the main (ground/first) floor, there is generally a prefix (sub/park/etc.) plus a number. The below ground numbers will sometimes be ascending (1 being the lowest available floor) and sometimes descending.
I've heard that older buildings skip the thirteenth floor, but I've only seen that once, so it's either a regional truth or largely a myth - not sure which.
FWIW,
-Chris C.
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As someone suggested it is a religious war. But maybe here is a way to peace.
Here is a scenario:
You load a date value from your DB. Then you want to display an image depending on the month value. So you use something like image[month], month being derived from your date value. Alas you get an error on image[12] and you realise despite voting for zero-based arrays on CodeProject, and implementing such in your code, your evolutionary past has made you make an off-by-one error. Your computer counts the months from 0 to 11 but you do from 1 to 12. And no matter how hard you try, after decades of programming, you cannot not make these mistakes.
So what do you do, Either of two things:
1) Waste image[0] and use image[1] to image[12]
2) Modify your reference in code to read: image[month-1]
Are 90% of voters telling me they prefer not wasting memory (of what could be as little as one byte), instead preferring to have the additional subtraction in their code?
I prefer to sacrifice element 0 for clarity in my code, not to mention saving the extra subtraction operation.
Having said that, as pointed out by many others, many representations require us to also be able to represent absence of something, such as a primary color in a color combination. We simply cannot do without a zero index there.
So, my conclusion: let's put our religious preferences aside. In each case do what is practical and comes more naturally.
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That seems to me like a troubling coding practice.
Consider that if your array is an array of extremely large structures, say of 500 megabytes each, then it can hardly be said that you are losing only one byte (that entire space will be allocated for one such structure, complete with all of it's fields set to their defaults). Yes, I voted zero, and I am not in the habit of wasting 500 megs, or any other sizable chunk of memory, just for the sake of my code being a little more "human-readable"--whatever that's supposed to mean these days. To that end I cringe at the thought of wasting even just one byte, but maybe that's because I had an inspirational C teacher who wanted me to know whether ++i or i++ was faster by a matter of picoseconds, with gcc optimizations turned off, or how to beat quicksort when given numerous details about the distribution and type of data to be sorted (perhaps a non-comparison sort? linear time, anyone?). On the matter of forsaking the entire 0th element in an array for no reason other than "taste," I politely refuse--so fire me.
-Gatsby
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Jay Gatsby wrote: Consider that if your array is an array of extremely large structures, say of
500 megabytes each, then it can hardly be said that you are losing only one byte
(that entire space will be allocated for one such structure, complete with all
of it's fields set to their defaults).
You would be crazy to have an array of large structures. Use an array of pointers to the structures, much more efficient when it comes to sorting and stuff like that. Also, then it not very expensive (4 byte on a 32 bit machine) to skip element zero.
You may be right
I may be crazy
-- Billy Joel --
Within you lies the power for good - Use it!
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That may be so in some cases, but consider that my example is a theoretical to begin with. To the point, I can turn around and say "yeah, but suppose you're programming in some god-forsaken language that completely hides pointers from you entirely, and uses references rather unintelligently." The example I gave was to illustrate the fact that memory is going to waste, period. Whether you're wasting a 4-byte pointer or a 500-megabyte data cell, it's still a waste, and my point still stands--that's just silly.
Suppose you have an algorithm which uses 4 byte pointers to 500 megabyte data cells that requires 125,000,000 copies of this list to be made in order to do some computation. one 4 byte pointer times the 125,000,000 times it's wasted is 500 megabytes total of wasted memory--hah, you see what I did there? I can contrive extreme examples all day, but the point is still the same, a waste is still a waste, regardless of size.
-Gatsby
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"To that end I cringe at the thought of wasting even just one byte..."
So you would rather waste the space taken by the assembly code for subtraction and a tiny bit of time?
"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself."-Unknown
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