On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Russ P. <russ.paie...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Aug 20, 11:19 am, geremy condra <debat...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Not sure what you read, but for me (mostly number theory, numerical >> analysis, and abstract algebra) zero-based indexing is quite common. > > My background is in aerospace control engineering. I am certainly not > familiar with the literature in pure mathematics, but I assume that > the math textbooks I used on college used standard mathematical > notation. > > If one-based indexing is becoming more common in the literature, I'll > bet that is only because it is so widely used in computer programming > -- not because the writers decided independently that it is a better > notation. But that's just a guess on my part.
I can't speak for the motivation for selecting that notation, but I'm not sure it matters anyway- if the rationale for a switch is to become consistent with mathematical notation and the 0-based indexing is becoming a common notation in that field then we achieve consistency by standing still. Geremy Condra -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
