Zero worship

I recently read a design document which stated that since an ID value was to be viewable by a user, it should start from 1, rather than 0. Counting from 1 is apparently easier for humans to understand.

This offends me. It has offended me for many years. Fortunately in software engineering, at least my speciality which is C programming, arrays start at 0. Unfortunately, in recent years some software engineers have used the relatively vast amount of memory available as an excuse to 1 base their arrays, and not caring about the waste of the 0th memory element - or apparently about the elegance of their code or the fact that they will be damned to eternity in hell for their nefarious crime.

So, why does this issue irritate me? I didn't know until now, but I have figured it out. The simple fact is that no-one counts from 1. We all count from 0. My tiny daughter, less than 2 years old, only counts shoes, and as such never gets past two. But she always starts with no shoes.

It is true that the zero we start counting from is rarely explicitly stated, which is why it isn't immediately obvious that we count from zero. But we must. Imagine counting from 1 to 5. One, two, three, four, five. Start at one, end at five. If we counted to five, how come we're only 4 higher than where we started? The answer is we didn't start at 1. We started at zero.

Everyone knows this. Even my toddler. But to help everyone actually understand, I shall continue, with renewed vigour, to pursue my quest to keep arrays zero based. Even in userland.

Disclaimer: the opinions stated in this article are the author's own, and not those of his employer, or indeed anyone else he's ever met.