On 08/16/10 21:54, David Cournapeau wrote: > On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 9:53 AM, Gregory Ewing > <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: >>> On Aug 7, 2010, at 9:14 PM, John Nagle wrote: >>> >>>> The languages which have real multidimensional arrays, rather >>>> than arrays of arrays, tend to use 1-based subscripts. That >>>> reflects standard practice in mathematics. >> >> Not always -- mathematicians use whatever starting index is >> most convenient for the problem at hand. > > Yes, there are many engineering fields where index starts at 0. Partly > for the reason you have stated concerning polynomials, especially > since this extend to series, which are pervasive in numerical > computing. In linear algebra, though, I remember to have always noted > matrices indexes in the [1,n] range, not [0,n-1].
I'm sure some would prefer to denote it as [0, n) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
