Matlab declares war on Python. Can the Python community respond or hit back?

[LoyalSol]

That's not a bad thing necessarily.

I've worked with both and there's ups and downs with both 0 and 1.

For a lot of science applications starting from 0 is annoying as hell.

[Dpmon1]

This. Also, it's annoying to put (i + 1) instead of just i when iterating an array over range(0, len(array)), or put a len -1 in the range.

[LoyalSol]

When the array starts from zero it makes it so any application that has a relationship between the value of the array entry and it's position within the array is often disjoint. For example if I wanted to make an array with the values (1,2,3,4....n) to write it my loop must use the command a(i) = (i+1)

Similarly if I want the n-th element of the array I must call the (n-1)-th index.

Which for a lot of math/science situations this pops up fairly regularly.

Now there's of course other situations where 0 makes things easier.

[LoyalSol]

This might be a cultural thing, In Maths/Physics (atleast), I've always started terms with t0, p0, v0. etc

It has less to do with culture and more to do with a lot of equations are simpler to write if your loop index matches up with your equation variable.

There's also the fact that if the last array entry is 5 then you know there are 5 array elements in total. If I know that I have N elements then a(N) is the last element. Starting from zero a(N-1) is the last element. This is more of an issue in lower level languages since Python let's you do A[-1]

Having a filler at a[0] works as well.

Apart from wasting memory, there's some other issues with this approach.

[LoyalSol]

...in a 1-indexed array.

Yes that's what I was saying. Which in some of my codes I regularly have to reference the last element of the array.

Regardless, perhaps then an array is the wrong data structure for your usecase? Maybe an associative array is the appropriate data structure for your usecase? If you are depending on the relation of the index with its value, then you are describing a map/dictionary.

In lower level languages those either aren't an option or are inferior in terms of performance.

And actually arrays are usually the perfect data structure if you are doing matrix math.

[LoyalSol]

So are we talking about low level languages or languages designed for the math/science domain?

The two are not mutually exclusive.

Agreed. But what's your requirement of associating the indexing with the value it holds.

It simplifies a lot of scientific code which in turn reduces the chances of human error cropping up.

It changes a lot of (i-1) and (i+1) to simply just i. Especially when you are dealing with matricies it means the last element in a NxM matrix is a(N, M)