Python "why" questions

Lie Ryan lie.1296 at gmail.com
Tue Aug 17 10:59:05 EDT 2010


On 08/16/10 21:54, David Cournapeau wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 9:53 AM, Gregory Ewing
> <greg.ewing at 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)




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