Python Feature Request: Allow changing base of member indices to 1

[Alex Martelli]

faulkner <faulkner891 at gmail.com> wrote:
   ...
> __future__ is used to access upcoming features, and changing the base
> offset is not [and never will be] slated for future development. zero
> has been used as the base offset in all real languages since the dawn
> of time, and isn't something that can be changed without seriously
> breaking heads.

While I agree that base-1 indexing in Python would be crazy, I resent
the implication that Fortran isn't "a real language" -- it WAS the first
high level language of any real worth, it survived over 50 years so far,
and its chief developer John Backus, alas recently departed, vastly
deserved his 1977 Turing Award (and not just for his later contributions
in syntax notation [the BNF] and functional programming).  "The dawn of
time" for high-level languages was exactly the '50s, when Fortran was
born -- with 1-based array indexing, arguably a minor technical error
(as definitely was the case for the fact that DO-loops always executed
1+ times, never 0 times), but definitely not enough to disqualify it as
"a real language".


Alex