I do not like the idea to regard words as vectors - these are two 
completely different concepts. Words have prefixes and suffixes, can be 
concatenated, and subwords can be extracted - what would all of these mean 
for vectors? On the other side, vectors can be added and multiplied by 
scalars (and matrices), not meaningful for words. Therefore, the question 
which indices to use for words and which for vectors/matrices can/should be 
discussed (and decided) separately. I would prefer indices starting with 0 
for words, and indices starting with 1 for vectors and matrices.

On Wednesday, September 2, 2020 at 8:12:50 PM UTC+2 Norman Megill wrote:

> I don't want to be the one making the decision on this, in part because I 
> won't be doing the bulk of the work, and I don't really have special 
> expertise in the matter.  It just seems that starting at 0 goes against 
> virtually all of published mathematics on matrices.
>
> I would feel better if someone could find a book on linear algebra with 
> matrices starting at 0.  I was unable to find one.  Even Cormen et. al.  
> _Algorithms_ (which is computer-science oriented) start at 1 in their 
> chapter on matrices.
>
> What is the connection between words and matrices in the literature, and 
> how does it handle the 0- vs. 1-based conversion?  Is all or most of the 
> literature on words 0-based?
>
> BTW it seems that the main computer algebra languages start at 1 
> (Mathematica, Matlab and R are mentioned):
>
> https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/86189/why-do-mathematica-list-indices-start-at-1
>
> Norm
>

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