[Numpy-discussion] Does zero based indexing drive anyone else crazy?

[Christopher Barker]

Webb Sprague wrote:

> it is far more natural to program if the indices are aligned with the
> counts of the elements

I suggest that it's only more natural if that's what you're used to -- 
i.e. you come form other languages that do it that way.

I fairly rarely get bitten by indexing 1, rather than zero, but I save a 
lot of errors that I used to get in MATLAB by the way python does slices:

len(a[i:j]) == j - i

and:

l[:j] + l[j:] == l

or:

r_[a[:i],a[i:]] == a

for numpy arrays.

I suppose you could have one-indexing and the python slicing, but I 
think that would be even more error prone.

>  zero
> based indexing made lots of sense since it dovetailed with thinking in
> memory offsets in systems programming

it also dovetails nicely into using an array to represent a grid of values:

i = (X - MinX) / deltaX
rather than
i = (X - MinX) / deltaX + 1

X = i*deltaX
rather than
X = (i-1)*deltaX

In Fortran, you can choose where you want your array indexing to start, 
and I found myself starting with zero more often than 1, and I was never 
a C programmer.

 > I guess I just want to vent, but also to ask if anyone
> has found any way to deal with this issue in their own scientific
> programming.

You'll get used to it. There are disadvantages either way, but after 
switching from primarily Matlab to primarily Python, I like zero-based 
indexing better. Perhaps you will too.

-Chris


-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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