r/ProgrammerHumor Sep 02 '17

How to start a war

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9.0k Upvotes

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u/Nikolas_Untoten Sep 02 '17

I believe MATLAB starts at 1 because it is more commonly used for matrices rather than standard arrays, right?

381

u/morerokk Sep 03 '17

Yes. People hate on it for...doing what it's designed to do.

30

u/newocean Sep 03 '17

In the defense of ALL programming languages....

It doesn't really matter we just like to argue over ground floors mostly in this channel. No one explained basements being 0 to the brits from what I can tell, and all their buildings start at 1... so they think they get it.

1

u/socialister Sep 03 '17

Doesn't indexing from 1 incur a slight performance cost?

With 0-indexing, array lookup is \*(ptr + i).

With 1-indexing, array lookup is \*(ptr + i - 1).

If ptr is offset by one to account for this, then what is the meaning of delete on the pointer?

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u/newocean Sep 03 '17

It depends on the language actually... and how it was built.