Much of R is itself written in R, so you cannot possibly change something as fundamental as this. Further, index 0 has a special meaning that you would lose if R have 0-based indexing.
However, the R thinking is to work with whole objects (vectors, arrays, lists ...) and you rather rarely need to know what numbers are in an index vector. There are usages such as 1:n, and those are quite often wrong: they should be seq(length=n) or seq(along=x) or some such, since n might be zero. If you are writing code that works with single elements, you are probably a lot better off writing C code to link into R (and C is 0-based ...). On Wed, 31 Mar 2004, Bob Cain wrote: > > I'm very new to R and utterly blown away by not only the > language but the unbelievable set of packages and the > documentation and the documentation standards and... > > I was an early APL user and never lost my love for it and in > R I find most of the essential things I loved about APL > except for one thing. At this early stage of my learning I > can't yet determine if there is a way to effect what in APL > was zero index origin, the ordinality of indexes starts with > 0 instead of 1. Is it possible to effect that in R without > a lot of difficulty? > > I come here today from the world of DSP research and > development where Matlab has a near hegemony. I see no > reason whatsoever that R couldn't replace it with a _far_ > better and _far_ less idiosyncratic framework. I'd be > interested in working on a Matlab equivalent DSP package for > R (if that isn't being done by someone) and one of the > things most criticized about Matlab from the standpoint of > the DSP programmer is its insistence on 1 origin indexing. > Any feedback greatly appreciated. > > > Thanks, > > Bob > -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
