On Saturday, 1 August 2015 at 09:35:53 UTC, DLearner wrote:
Does the D language set in stone that the first element of an
array _has_ to be index zero?
Wouldn't starting array elements at one avoid the common
'off-by-one' logic error, it does
seem more natural to begin a count at 1.
Actually, maybe even better to allow array definitions of form
int foo[x:y];
(y >= x) creating integer variables foo[x], foo[x+1],...,foo[y].
I think the (very old) IBM PL/I language was like this.
Seems you could easily wrap an array in a struct, define opIndex
and opSlice appropriately, and use alias this to keep the other
properties of the array. The problem you'll run into is
interacting with other code that assumes zero-based indexing. I
thought about setting the first index at 1 for my library that
embeds D inside R, since that's how it's done in R, but very
quickly realized how confusing it would be.
