[Python-ideas] [Python-Dev] Inclusive Range (original) (raw)

Masklinn masklinn at masklinn.net
Tue Oct 5 11:08:35 CEST 2010

On 2010-10-05, at 10:54 , Carl M. Johnson wrote:

Changing range would only make sense if lists were also changed to start at 1 instead of 0, and that's never gonna happen. It's a massively backwards incompatible change with no real offsetting advantage.

Still, if you were designing a brand new language today, would you have arrays/lists start at 0 or 1? (Or compromise and do .5?) I personally lean towards 1, since I recall being frequently tripped up by the first element in an array being a[0] way back when I first learn C++ in the 20th century. But maybe this was because I had been messed up by writing BASIC for loops from 1 to n before that? Is there anyone with teaching experience here? Is this much of a problem for young people learning Python (or any other zero-based indexing language) as their first language? What do you guys think? Now that simplifying pointer arithmetic isn't such an important consideration, is it still better to do zero-based indexing?

I will refer to EWD 831[0], which talks about ranges and starting indexes without once referring to pointers.

Pointers are in fact entirely irrelevant to the discussion: FORTRAN and ALGOL 60, among many others, used 1-indexed collections. Some languages (ADA, I believe, though I am by no means certain) also allow for arbitrary starting indexes.

[0] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF

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