On Aug 20, 1:23 am, Martin Braun <martin.br...@kit.edu> wrote: > I find this thread extremely interesting, but what surprised me that > everyone seems to agree that mathematics is 1-based, but we Pythoneers > should stick to zero-based. I disagree. To make sure I'm not going > crazy, I took the top five books lying on my desk, which were the DSP > book by Oppenheim/Schafer, two books by Stephen M. Kay (Spectral > Estimation and Estimation Theory) and the Channel Coding book by Lin & > Costello. This is isn't pure mathematics (as in proving the Goldbach > conjecture), but nevertheless, this is serious mathematics and, > surprise, they most exclusively use zero-based notation. > You probably don't have those books in grabbing distance, so here's some > examples for zero-based stuff:
That's interesting, but I think zero-based indexing is rare in the literature of mathematics, applied math, science and engineering. All the literature I've ever seen that uses vectors and matrices is one- based, and that includes text books and technical papers. It all boils down to personal preference, but I just find it strange that we would not try to make programming as consistent as possible with notational conventions in the literature. If I try to implement some algorithm I find in a technical book or paper, why should I have to mentally offset every index by one? That's very error prone, and I have more important things to think about. Then again, I don't do that very often, so maybe it's not a big deal. The zero-based indexing just seemed wrong to me when I first saw it. I'm used to it by now, but it still doesn't seem quite right to me. It's almost right -- but it's off by one. I still have a habit of taking the "1" element when I really want the "0" element. Most programmers probably never use vectors and matrices, so they don't care about the inconsistency with standard mathematical notation. And yes, I understand that zero-based indexing can be slightly more efficient. That's why I think it's appropriate for low-level languages such as C. However, I think one-based indexing is more appropriate for high-level languages. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
