[TUHS] Array index history

Tim Bradshaw tfb at tfeb.org
Fri Jun 9 04:41:55 AEST 2017


> On 7 Jun 2017, at 20:15, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:
> 
> In the days when memory and clock cycles were costly, an extra decrement or subtract was not something to be taken lightly :)

Indeed they weren't, and that's how we know that 1-based indexing doesn't require any overhead given a reasonably good compiler.  If you'd gone to people writing big CFD simulations in 1975 and told them that by using a version of FORTRAN which had 0-based arrays they could save any significant runtime at all then they would have changed to it without a thought.  But they didn't.


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