In case you were wondering, here’s a quick list of programming languages whose arrays start at 1 (made with the help of this Wikipedia page):
- ALGOL 68
- APL
- AWK
- CFML
- COBOL
- Fortran
- FoxPro
- Julia
- Lua
- Mathematica
- MATLAB
- PL/1
- RPG
- Sass
- Smalltalk
- Wolfram Language
- XPath/XQuery
Thanks to Anna Filina for the find!
One reply on “Arrays and disappointment”
Someone on Imgur brought up a good point (hey, first time I’ve said that before): It doesn’t matter if indices start at 0 or 1 anymore, because most languages are switching to using more iterator-like structures and map methods over actual manual iteration of indices.
The next generation of programmers will probably get confused about why this was even a debate because they’ll barely ever need to use the language feature. It’s like debating the right way to use a ‘goto’.