This has been a topic for a long time. I wrote this "announcement" in April 1, 2006 in comp.dsp.As background, Grant Griffin was a very active member on comp.dsp and had a site called dspGuru.
Press - Release April II, MMVI (April 1, 2006 for those barbarian 0 index DSP guys)After careful consideration, Mathwork's Cleve Moler had this announcement
to make:It's been brought to our attention that many of our DSP customers are unhappy with our choice of one-based indexing. We were relieved when dsp- guru, Grant Grifffn made such a fine argument supporting our long held convention. Since Mr Griffin is clearly the leader of all the DSP community, being the dsp-guru and all, we believe we can now put this
matter to rest.We also did some historical research. The Romans created many engineering marvels during the height of their empire and they did not use 0 in their numbering system. It is our belief that DSP barbarians (with their heretical 0 based numbering notions), invaded from the north and set back
Western Civilization for over a thousand years.Therefore to protect our current civilization from a similar fate, Mathworks has decided that we have a responsibility to change our numbering system to respond only to Roman Numerals. We know that this might be a small inconvenience to a few of you but we are sure that you will all go
along when you consider the bigger issues. Supporting Argument Follows:Grant Griffin <nos...@yahoo.com <javascript:>> wrote in news:4a503$442e975f$4088dbc7$1304
@EVERESTKC.NET <http://everestkc.net/>:> Am I the only person who's noticed that C's zero-based indexing is > nothing short of...well...horrible? And it doesn't end there: C has > been so influential that its insanity has spread to tons of other
> languages: C++, Java, C#, Python, Perl--heck, even LISP. >> Am I the only one here who's suffered a needless off-by-one bug as a > result of C's horrible zero-based indexing? Let's see a show of hands...
>> But more important, to those of us in DSP, is the fact that C's indexing > doesn't conform to Matlab--which wisely employs one-based indexing in > accordance with the centurys-old convention of linear algebra. Now, one > might ask, "who died and left Matlab in charge?" Well, nobody, I guess. > But if the Matlab folks hadn't gotten this right, why would so many > DSP folks shell out *thousands* for Matlab, when zero-based alternatives > like SciPy (http://scipy.org/) are absolutely, 100%, free? There can be
> only one answer: one-based indexing. >> OK, I can already hear some of you about to cite the old "legacy code" > chestnut as a reason C can't be changed. True, there's a lot of C code > out there. But there's absolutely no reason that C can't switch to > one-based with a zero-based compatibility mode. OK, I know, I know: C++ > programmers can easily create their own one-based array object. But > what sense does it make for countless programmers to home-brew a > solution when Dennis Ritchie could just get off his duff and fix the > problem once-and-for-all? After all, Grace Hopper did it for FORTRAN.
>> Sound radical? I don't think so: let's face it, we live in a one-based > world. For example, ask a child to count their fingers, and they'll
> invariably assign "one" to the first (er, "zeroth") finger. >> Still not convinced? OK, what about the calendar?--what if today was
> "April 0th"? > >=g2> _____________________________________________________________________
> > Grant R. Griffin> Publisher of dspGuru http://www.dspguru.com <http://www.dspguru.com/> > Iowegian International Corporation http://www.iowegian.com <http://www.iowegian.com/> > Seehttp://www.iowegian.com/img/contact.gif <http://www.iowegian.com/img/contact.gif>for e-mail address
> -- Al Clark Danville Signal Processing, Inc. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Purveyors of Fine DSP Hardware and other Cool StuffAvailable athttp://www.danvillesignal.com <http://www.danvillesignal.com/>
On 4/1/2015 9:35 AM, David Akbari wrote:
Hopefully this is not an April Fool's joke. On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 9:19 AM, robert bristow-johnson <r...@audioimagination.com> wrote:On 4/0/15 6:24 AM, Max wrote:I was glad to hear that Mathworks has finally corrected their array indexing scheme to start with 0 instead of 1, so they're now compatible with all the other languages out in the real world. Apparently they knew all along that array indexes actually start at zero, but a bug in the initial release of the code caused the 'off by one' problem. An admission of such a glaring math error would have been disastrous, so they claimed that they meant to do it. Mark this day on your calendar as the day when corresponding source code needs to be corrected. And perhaps the day that I get hunted down by some humorless Mathworks salesman :-)thought i would cross-post this announcement from comp.dsp . -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com "Imagination is more important than knowledge." -- dupswapdrop -- the music-dsp mailing list and website: subscription info, FAQ, source code archive, list archive, book reviews, dsp links http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp-- dupswapdrop -- the music-dsp mailing list and website: subscription info, FAQ, source code archive, list archive, book reviews, dsp links http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp
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