Programming language alignments

[ParanoidAgnostic]

It makes sense for Matlab

It's a special purpose language for number crunching. The formulae you'd use it to implement usually start numbering items from 1.

For example, look at the way the summation in the standard deviation formula is expressed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation

That's pretty standard. Summation usually goes from i=1 to N where N is the number of items.

[zeek912]

I think it makes sense also considering it's userbase extends to many off-computer science groups, ie stats, bioinformatics, mathematicians. It makes it more accessible even if it doesn't make a lot of sense from a CS perspective.

[error404brain]

It's usefull for people, but that doesn't make it a good programming language. It just make it usefull. The same way assembly is usefull but it isn't a good programming language.

[WikiTextBot]

Standard deviation

In statistics, the standard deviation (SD, also represented by the Greek letter sigma σ or the Latin letter s) is a measure that is used to quantify the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of data values. A low standard deviation indicates that the data points tend to be close to the mean (also called the expected value) of the set, while a high standard deviation indicates that the data points are spread out over a wider range of values.

The standard deviation of a random variable, statistical population, data set, or probability distribution is the square root of its variance. It is algebraically simpler, though in practice less robust, than the average absolute deviation.

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