Science Memes

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Just Terrible (mander.xyz)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (10 children)

MATLAB is for matrix calcs. Matrix indices start at 1, fight me. Given a matrix X of m x n size, you write

Matlab has many issues, amongst other accessibility (which can be remedied by piracy), closed-software, but as a program designed to do computational matrix manipulation, starting at index 1 is literally correct. This is how you learn matrix indices in intro linear algebra. How is it make sense then you use a software to assist computation and start indexing at 0, while you write the equations and indices on a piece of paper you start at 1. CS majors go home.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

Starting at 0 makes sense in low-level languages like C because it's not really an index but a memory offset. Higher level languages like SQL or MatLab correctly start at 1 because they abstract memory management away. Other languages without manual memory management, such as JavaScript or Python, are incorrectly starting their arrays at 0.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

Almost every programming language uses 0.

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