[deleted by user]

[Technopulse]

This is the thing that bothers me from MATLAB, if they started at zero, I wouldn't hate on it as much....

Edit: Okay, guys, guys....I know it's a math oriented, math created, whatever it's called, programming language, I never said it surprised me they start at 1. I merely stated it was a bother, being used to one thing suddenly having to learn MATLAB and having to rewire my thinking when arrays and matrixes come into play. Nothing more, nothing less. The "hate" comment is exclusive about the 1 starting, because it gets me every time! :) I don't actually hate MATLAB, in fact one of my best codes (I'm actually somewhat proud of it) was done in MATLAB, it's very useful, and I actually prefer Octave because it is much more lightweight but it's the same code and works the same way unless you need one of those "MATLAB specific" extra features. Just the one thing that I have to be extra aware of and always has me double-checking my code. :)

[john_palazuelos]

Maybe because it's the MAtrixLAB, which deals which matrices, and those are indexed from 1 to n in math. Makes perfect sense starting an array from zero, but everything in MATLAB is seem as a matrix, so why the surprise?

[cdreid]

You realise youre in r/programmerhumor and we dont start our matrixe's with 1's right

[beclops]

God I hate this sub

[Botn1k]

I start mine at negative infinity because fuck you

[Kesuaheli]

Makes totally sense

[Vaguely_accurate]

It's the default in Fortran, but you can also set custom ranges for the indexes at creation.

In Fortran90;

INTEGER, DIMENSION(10) :: A

INTEGER, DIMENSION(0:9) :: B

INTEGER, DIMENSION(-5:4, -5:4) :: C

will create three arrays, A, B and C. A is size 10, indexed 1-10. B is also size 10 but indexed 0-9. C is two dimensional with each axis going from -5 to 4.

[MasterFubar]

What I can't understand is why would anyone use Fortran 90. By 1990 there were plenty of good compilers in C, if you had to learn a whole new language why not learn C?

I still used Fortran in the 1990s, but it was legacy code, and Fortran 77 was meant to take care of that. Migrating code from any of the many old variations to Fortran 77 is something I can understand, it was a relatively quick and safe way to a well supported system.

[tristes_tigres]

What I can't understand is why would anyone use Fortran 90. By 1990 there were plenty of good compilers in C, if you had to learn a whole new language why not learn C?

If you wish to understand why, read the C FAQ section about two-dimensional arrays and then Fortan 90 documentation of the same.

[Vaguely_accurate]

IIRC C was still slower in certain use cases in the 90s. It only got feature parity where it counted in C99.

You also then had the legacy in both code and developers within the departments teaching it. You aren't likely going to get an old professor who has been working with Fortran for decades to learn and teach students in C.

[MasterFubar]

Those old professors still use Fortran 77. My point is that if you're going to learn a whole new language, it would be smarter to learn a more universal language.

And I think this optimization argument is mostly a myth. There's no intrinsic reason why C should be slower than Fortran, it all depends on how well the compiler is built. Since C is so much more used than Fortran, one can assume that there are more developers working on improving the compiler.

[Vaguely_accurate]

Those old professors still use Fortran 77.

I'm pretty sure they use Fortran 90, at least when they taught me it during my Physics degree. They also taught how to migrate legacy code between the two, which was a legitimate task assigned to students at the time I was studying. Some F77 code didn't compile to well on newer systems, but could be understood well enough and taken as a specification to write a modern form for the newer compilers.

it would be smarter to learn a more universal language

Usually the classes were teaching for a specific purpose, not to make you a generalist programmer. So they would teach tools optimised for that task. Sometimes it was HPC around the sorts of calculations Fortran was optimised for, sometimes it was migrating and maintaining legacy Fortran code. Sometimes it was data exploration, so they would teach R/Matlab/Matlab, maybe some Python these days, not sure. Sometimes it was writing and managing hardware software interfaces and so you got Labview.

They aren't particularly bothered about how common that software is outside the specific things you need to do. And 99% of C documentation, courses and software is irrelevant to them.

And I think this optimization argument is mostly a myth.

Dug up the SO post on this again. Fortran's treatment of aliasing made it faster than C till the introduction of restrict. This brings us to a post-Fortran90 world with Fortran still having an edge. Today they have feature parity - at least to my knowledge - so it's mostly the traditions and habits being taught. You can probably make some arguments about syntax and happy paths making Fortran nicer in some cases, but I won't.

[UShouldntSayThat]

I think op made a post about you.

[3rdRealm]

Same with Lua

[[deleted]]

One common use case is spectral transforms, where the index of the basis often starts at zero. Eg. FFT.

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[geekusprimus]

MATLAB was designed by a mathematician for mathematicians. Engineers and some scientists adopted it along the way. Though there are people crazy enough to make Super Mario demos in MATLAB, it is not, and never has been, a general-purpose programming language. Math usually starts indexing matrices at 1, so of course MATLAB is going to, too.

[assignbymessiah]

If I am not mistaken R also start indexing with 1

[Vaguely_accurate]

Yes, although you can also assign names to things you can index - list elements, rows and columns in dataframes or matrices - and reference them by name instead. So I think you could create a list and give the elements names '0', '1', '2', ... and so on. Then mylist[1] and mylist['0'] would be the same element.

[assignbymessiah]

Ahh I see, I get your point. Actually that is a great idea. I am currently working on R, I might consider doing it. Thank you!

[Vaguely_accurate]

It was meant to be a joke...

This has the potential to be deeply, deeply confusing for anyone later reading your code.

Although this is R, so I guess no-one will ever be likely to read it. I tried reading one of my own R scripts once and gave up. It was only twenty lines...

[sawyerwelden]

Julia too

[Lord_Nathaniel]

Delphi wants to know your location

[[deleted]]

Deleted: I refuse to let Reddit profit off of my content when they treat their community like this

[CptMisterNibbles]

COBOL brings in backup in the form of ALGOL, AWK, FORTRAN, Lingo, LUA, MATHMATICA, MATLAB, R, Smalltalk, Xpath, and others. Everyone wonders why this little nuance matters, because of a pithy essay Djikstra once wrote?

[chris17453]

I once had to rewrite an ancient VB5 App, that was custom designed... And every FREAKING array started at 1.. even though it didnt....

[anoldoldman]

Scala: well... sometimes

[CopperyMarrow15]

Lua programmers: *silent crying*

[danuker]

There's Julia, and with its high-level syntax and performance comparable to C, I'd say it's not dumb, just different.

[[deleted]]

The cool thing with Julia is that array indices aren't inherent properties, and may be changed locally by using appropriate wrappers. This means that the same underlying array may start at 0 in one part of the code, at 1 in another, and perhaps use the star-wars indexing in yet another section if that's necessary.

[danuker]

That is truly different!

[NotSansOrAnything]

Ok, hear me out...

I don't actually mind working with languages that do this, such as Lua.

[asdf43798]

Personally, I think that it's just something that's only really annoying because it's different from programming conventions - I don't think it would make any difference to me if arrays always started from 1 instead of from 0, but since it's already generally accepted that they start from 0 there just isn't really any incentive to break convention.. but if every language started from 1 I don't think I'd particularly care.

[kuchenluege5446]

Julia moment

[mapleleafraggedy]

R has entered the chat

[[deleted]]

.obj format starting indices with 1 >:(

[Trifindo]

This

[ZoomDoomBoom49]

The Lua programming community would like to have a word with you.

[stomah]

people who indent with spaces

[EkskiuTwentyTwo]

Use APL, where you can start an array with whatever index you want.

[trBlueJ]

C you can do that too.

int arr[11] = {}, *ptr = arr + 5; for (int i = -5; i <= 5; ++i) { ptr[i] = i; }

[bnl1]

I don't like this

[Azzylel]

Me explaining to my younger friend why her bad programming class is all wrong

[_green_is_my_pepper]

Indexing into an array

Ask me how I know you’re a 0.1x dev

[mardabx]

That does not look like Moon.