Python "why" questions

[Russ P.]

On Aug 19, 11:04 am, Steven D'Aprano <st... at REMOVE-THIS-
cybersource.com.au> wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:15:54 -0700, Russ P. wrote:
> > The convention of starting with zero may have had some slight
> > performance advantage in the early days of computing, but the huge
> > potential for error that it introduced made it a poor choice in the long
> > run, at least for high-level languages.
>
> People keep saying this, but it's actually the opposite. Signpost errors
> and off-by-one errors are more common in languages that count from one.
>
> A simple example: Using zero-based indexing, suppose you want to indent
> the string "spam" so it starts at column 4. How many spaces to you
> prepend?
>
> 0123456789
>     spam
>
> Answer: 4. Nice and easy and almost impossible to get wrong. To indent to
> position n, prepend n spaces.
>
> Now consider one-based indexing, where the string starts at column 5:
>
> 1234567890
>     spam
>
> Answer: 5-1 = 4. People are remarkably bad at remembering to subtract the
> 1, hence the off-by-one errors.
>
> Zero-based counting doesn't entirely eliminate off-by-one errors, but the
> combination of that plus half-open on the right intervals reduces them as
> much as possible.
>
> The intuitive one-based closed interval notation used in many natural
> languages is terrible for encouraging off-by-one errors. Quick: how many
> days are there between Friday 20th September and Friday 27th September
> inclusive? If you said seven, you fail.

The error mode you refer to is much less common than the typical off-
by-one error mode. In the far more common error mode, zero-based
indexing is far more error prone.

> One-based counting is the product of human intuition. Zero-based counting
> is the product of human reason.

I suggest you take that up with mathematicians, who have used one-
based indexing all along. That's why it was used in Fortran and
Matlab, among other more mathematical and numerically oriented and
languages.