I'll write with my finance/insurance industry domain hat on.
Since people are born at age 0, and durations start at time 0, then []io
0 is very much better than []io 1. Indeed, I would say that incorrect
adjustments for []io 1 (e.g. dat[16] not recognized as the value for
age/duration 15) was the primary reason for program bugs in that business.
On Saturday, July 24, 2010 09:16 PM, Roger Hui wrote:
> I have been asked by some APL colleagues about
> index origin 0 in J. The question is, does the choice
> of a fixed value of 0 for index origin a hindrance to
> your work? The question is specifically addressed
> to "ordinary domain experts", people with no
> software engineering in their background and are not
> professional mathematicians.
>
> In case you did not know, in APL there is a choice
> known as the index origin, controlled by the variable
> quad-io, of counting from 1 instead of from 0, affecting
> the left argument of { and the result of i. , among other things.
> I will say no more than this to avoid biasing your answers.
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