[TUHS] Array index history

[Arthur Krewat]

If you think of an array as a memory area of bytes, words, whatever, the 
simple way to deal with it is the index being 0 is the first in the array.

Why go to the trouble of decrementing the index to retreive the first 
entry?

ALGOL did indeed have arrays with bounds:

INTEGER ARRAY K,L[0:10,0:10];

Two arrays, K and L with 0 first, 10 last. Total of 11 elements.

Of course, it's a "higher level" language than C. My thinking on the 
subject is that C is very close to assembler, so if you're using for 
example Intel X86 instructions:

MOV SI,1
MOV AL,[SI + ARRAY1]                        ; retrieve the SECOND 
element (byte)

Likewise, for words, just left-shift SI one bit.

For me having started out in assembler (actually, MACRO-10 on a PDP-10), 
it's intuitive as to why/how C does arrays.

ak