To be honest, I actually agree that Dijkstra's argument seem a bit one sided. It's also interesting to see the argument in your linked article that offset and index doesn't have to be the same.
If I get the root of the argument in the linked article, it is that zero-based indexing is more of a optimization than anything, but I would disagree; there are reasons beyond that (see the examples in my previous comment).
Also, here's an example of an 1-index based system that has caused me some headaches: In music theory, the first note of the scale is called the "first", etc. It also talks about e.g. "stacking thirds", which means take the third of the scale, than take the third from there. However, the offsets are two. (first=offset 0, second=offset 1, third=offset 2). Which is hard to work with in my opinion.
You have an interesting argument about iterating backwards, although I would say; if we need a tie-breaker between the two, iterating forward should have more weight than backwards.
I appreciate your comment, and while trying as best I can to be convinced of the "other side", I still land on 0-indexing. The only argument I buy, is that it matches our natural language starting at 1. Which, of course, is a strong argument.
> we had better regard —after all those centuries!— zero as a most natural number
Of course, a counter argument is that we've already made the mistake of indexing with 1 in natural language (first, second, ...). That decision is not free of annoyances, though: the 19th century are year numbers 18xx, floors below the first have a varying names when they could have been negative numbers, etc.
I worked on a game where we added a "fairness" factor to randomness. If you were unlucky in one battle, you were lucky in the next, and vice versa. Mathematically you ended up completely fair. (The game designer hated it, though, and it wasn't shipped like that)
I struggled a bit to understand the explanation on github, but eventually got to something that made sense. It would have helped me if it said up front that
- 0, 1, N and Y pass the input signal on (works like a | or - in the input direction), and that
- when a circuit has both a 0 and 1 output value, the output becomes 0 (which is why 11 is an AND and not a OR)
Hopefully that's correctly understood? If so, maybe consider updating the explanation for the next person.
Also, a question: Does a 0 and 1 on the same circuit consume more power than two 0s or two 1s due to the conflicting values? Or is it solved with transistors at the cost of propagation delay? Or something else?
The Opera browser did for a short while. If I recall correctly, it was taken out since sysadmins at schools, workplaces, etc would ban the browser. Of course that behavior unfortunately ensured that bittorrent would remain a protocol mostly for piracy.
If I get the root of the argument in the linked article, it is that zero-based indexing is more of a optimization than anything, but I would disagree; there are reasons beyond that (see the examples in my previous comment).
Also, here's an example of an 1-index based system that has caused me some headaches: In music theory, the first note of the scale is called the "first", etc. It also talks about e.g. "stacking thirds", which means take the third of the scale, than take the third from there. However, the offsets are two. (first=offset 0, second=offset 1, third=offset 2). Which is hard to work with in my opinion.
You have an interesting argument about iterating backwards, although I would say; if we need a tie-breaker between the two, iterating forward should have more weight than backwards.
I appreciate your comment, and while trying as best I can to be convinced of the "other side", I still land on 0-indexing. The only argument I buy, is that it matches our natural language starting at 1. Which, of course, is a strong argument.