List of 1-indexed programming languages?

Question

What programming languages are 1-indexed?

So far I've got: Algol Matlab Action! Pascal and Fortran?

EDIT: What he meant was languages whose array subscriptions start with 1 instead of 0 like in C.

Answer 1

Lua - disappointingly

Answer 2

There is also Smalltalk

Answer 3

ColdFusion - even though it is Java under the hood

Answer 4

Not sure what you mean by 1-indexed.

But if you mean the base of an array then every flavour of BASIC with the exception of VB was traditionally '1-indexed' although you could change it with OPTION BASE {0 | 1}

Also the array declaration could contain a lower bound:

Dim MyArray(-19 To 20) As Integer

Answer 5

A list can be found on wikipedia.

Answer 6

A pretty big list of languages is on Wikipedia under Comparison of Programming Languages (array) under "Array system cross-reference list" table (Default base index column)

This has a good discussion of 1- vs. 0- indexed and subscriptions in general

To quote from the blog:

EWD831 by E.W. Dijkstra, 1982.

When dealing with a sequence of length N, the elements of which we wish to distinguish by subscript, the next vexing question is what subscript value to assign to its starting element. Adhering to convention a) yields, when starting with subscript 1, the subscript range 1 ≤ i < N+1; starting with 0, however, gives the nicer range 0 ≤ i < N. So let us let our ordinals start at zero: an element's ordinal (subscript) equals the number of elements preceding it in the sequence. And the moral of the story is that we had better regard —after all those centuries!— zero as a most natural number.

Remark:: Many programming languages have been designed without due attention to this detail. In FORTRAN subscripts always start at 1; in ALGOL 60 and in PASCAL, convention c) has been adopted; the more recent SASL has fallen back on the FORTRAN convention: a sequence in SASL is at the same time a function on the positive integers. Pity! (End of Remark.)

Answer 7

Ada and Pascal.

Answer 8

Visual FoxPro, FoxPro and Clipper all use arrays where element 1 is the first element of an array... I assume that is what you mean by 1-indexed.

Answer 9

FoxPro used arrays starting at index 1.

Answer 10

dBASE used arrays starting at index 1.

Arrays (Beginning) in dBASE

Answer 11

I see that the knowledge of fortran here is still on the '66 version.

Fortran has variable both the lower and the upper bounds of an array.

Meaning, if you declare an array like:

real, dimension (90) :: x

then 1 will be the lower bound (by default).

If you declare it like

real, dimension(0,89) :: x

then however, it will have a lower bound of 0.

If on the other hand you declare it like

real, allocatable :: x(:,:)

then you can allocate it to whatever you like. For example

allocate(x(0:np,0:np))

means the array will have the elements

x(0, 0), x(0, 1), x(0, 2 .... np)
x(1, 0), x(1, 1), ...
.
.
.
x(np, 0) ...

There are also some more interesting combinations possible:

real, dimension(:, :, 0:) :: d
real, dimension(9, 0:99, -99:99) :: iii

which are left as homework for the interested reader :)

These are just the ones I remembered off the top of my head. Since one of fortran's main strengths are array handling capabilities, it is clear that there are lot of other in&outs not mentioned here.

Answer 12

Although C is by design 0 indexed, it is possible to arrange for an array in C to be accessed as if it were 1 (or any other value) indexed. Not something you would expect a normal C coder to do often, but it sometimes helps.

Example:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(){
    int zero_based[10];
    int* one_based;
    int i;
    one_based=zero_based-1;

    for (i=1;i<=10;i++) one_based[i]=i;
    for(i=10;i>=1;i--) printf("one_based[%d] = %d\n", i, one_based[i]);
    return 0;
}

Answer 13

Nobody mentioned XPath.

Answer 14

RPG, including modern RPGLE

Answer 15

Found one - Lua (programming language)

Check Arrays section which says -

"Lua arrays are 1-based: the first index is 1 rather than 0 as it is for many other programming languages (though an explicit index of 0 is allowed)"

Answer 16

VB Classic, at least through

Option Base 1

Answer 17

Fortran, Matlab, Pascal, Algol, Smalltalk, and many many others.

Answer 18

Fortran starts at 1. I know that because my Dad used to program Fortran before I was born (I am 33 now) and he really criticizes modern programming languages for starting at 0, saying it's unnatural, not how humans think, unlike maths, and so on.

However, I find things starting at 0 quite natural; my first real programming language was C and *(ptr+n) wouldn't have worked so nicely if n hadn't started at zero!

Answer 19

JDBC (not a language, but an API)

String x = resultSet.getString(1);  // the first column

Answer 20

You can do it in Perl

$[ = 1;  # set the base array index to 1

You can also make it start with 42 if you feel like that. This also affects string indexes.

Actually using this feature is highly discouraged.

Answer 21

Erlang's tuples and lists index starting at 1.

Answer 22

Strings in Delphi start at 1.

(Static arrays must have lower bound specified explicitly. Dynamic arrays always start at 0.)

Answer 23

PL/SQL. An upshot of this is when using languages that start from 0 and interacting with Oracle you need to handle the 0-1 conversions yourself for array access by index. In practice if you use a construct like foreach over rows or access columns by name, it's not much of an issue, but you might want the leftmost column, for example, which will be column 1.

Answer 24

Mathematica and Maxima, besides other languages already mentioned.

Answer 25

Also in Ada you can define your array indices as required:

A : array(-5..5) of Integer;       -- defines an array with 11 elements
B : array(-1..1, -1..1) of Float;  -- defines a 3x3 matrix

Someone might argue that user-defined array index ranges will lead to maintenance problems. However, it is normal to write Ada code in a way which does not depend on the array indices. For this purpose, the language provides element attributes, which are automatically defined for all defined types:

A'first   -- this has the value -5
A'last    -- this has the value +5
A'range   -- returns the range -5..+5 which can be used e.g. in for loops

Answer 26

Indexes start at one in CFML.

Answer 27

informix, besides other languages already mentioned.

Answer 28

Basic - not just VB, but all the old 1980s era line numbered versions.

Richard