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Re:Why numbering should start at zero (1982) by int_19h on Thursday December 15, 2016 @02:08PM (#13187216)
It depends on the context. It's actually pretty common to make queries like "give me the third element" in data analysis, especially when your data sources come as a vaguely organized mess.

At the same time, it's not actually all that common to index elements in loops these days - most languages have some kind of a for-each construct that hides indices (and some, like Python, only have such a construct).

Re:Why numbering should start at zero (1982) by NoodleIncident on Thursday December 15, 2016 @02:37PM (#13187511)
Both slices and the 'for i in range(N)' are 0-indexed.
Re:Why numbering should start at zero (1982) by int_19h on Thursday December 15, 2016 @05:18PM (#13189074)
Yes, they are. My point was that when you enumerate collections in Python, it doesn't matter, because it's just `for x in xs: ...` - you don't actually see the indices. This is in response to "much more common to run through every element" in the parent comment - it's just not a relevant scenario for indexing in most languages today.

But slices definitely are, yes.