On Monday, 16 October 2017 at 18:56:03 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
I suppose this is like Walter not daring to write code with
1-based arrays. :D On that note, though, in D I only rarely
actually need to specify explicit indices. Foreach and generic
code alleviates most cases of explicit indexing I'd normally
write in C/C++ code, and I wouldn't be surprised if much of my
code could actually be ported to 1-based indexing with only
minor changes.
But I suppose if you're doing matrix/tensor math, you can't
really avoid this.
I always thought slicing was a more important difference for 0 or
1-based indexing, rather than loops.
Consider D's A[m..n] vs. Matlab's A[m:n]. Matlab's is easier to
explain to someone with a math background because you get A[m]
through A[n, instead of A[m] through A[n-1] in Ds. However, D's
A[m..n].length = n - m, whereas Matlab's length(A[m:n])= n - m +
1. Thus, you often find yourself adjusting formulae all over the
place to account for the extra "+1". Nevertheless, if you have
more of a mathematics background, you always need to remember
that if you wanted A[m:n] in Matlab, you need A[(m - 1)..n] to
get the equivalent in D.
