On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Russ P. <russ.paie...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Aug 20, 1:23 am, Martin Braun <martin.br...@kit.edu> wrote: > >> I find this thread extremely interesting, but what surprised me that >> everyone seems to agree that mathematics is 1-based, but we Pythoneers >> should stick to zero-based. I disagree. To make sure I'm not going >> crazy, I took the top five books lying on my desk, which were the DSP >> book by Oppenheim/Schafer, two books by Stephen M. Kay (Spectral >> Estimation and Estimation Theory) and the Channel Coding book by Lin & >> Costello. This is isn't pure mathematics (as in proving the Goldbach >> conjecture), but nevertheless, this is serious mathematics and, >> surprise, they most exclusively use zero-based notation. >> You probably don't have those books in grabbing distance, so here's some >> examples for zero-based stuff: > > That's interesting, but I think zero-based indexing is rare in the > literature of mathematics, applied math, science and engineering. All > the literature I've ever seen that uses vectors and matrices is one- > based, and that includes text books and technical papers.
Not sure what you read, but for me (mostly number theory, numerical analysis, and abstract algebra) zero-based indexing is quite common. > It all boils down to personal preference, but I just find it strange > that we would not try to make programming as consistent as possible > with notational conventions in the literature. If I try to implement > some algorithm I find in a technical book or paper, why should I have > to mentally offset every index by one? That's very error prone, and I > have more important things to think about. Then again, I don't do that > very often, so maybe it's not a big deal. Ever read code by a mathematician? It's usually (obviously not always) a nightmare. I'm glad we break with convention, particularly when that convention is things like one-letter variables and 'reuse' of notation. Geremy Condra -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list