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Discussion on: Why Do Most Programming Languages Index From Zero?

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Samuel Chan

I teach math and one thing I learned is that some mathematical languages (like Matlab and R) starts at index 1.

items[1] actually returns the first item in that array / list.

So perhaps that has got to do with the founding motivation of the language — all the way back to its founding philosophy.

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Lucia Cerchie

It's really cool to hear about this from the perspective of someone who uses Matlab and R! Yeah I'd think so -- these founding fathers of computer science were philosophers as well.