Re:Deep learning may need a new programming language
by wenc on Tuesday February 19, 2019 @10:28AM
(#19199564)
It's not that bad in practice. I wrote Matlab for 12-years and Python for 15-years and seamlessly switch between 0 and 1 indexing.
I know the arguments for 0 vs 1 indexing, but in practice it's not really an issue since they're both just book-keeping. The only time where things might get interesting is for certain complex recursive expressions (recursive in the mathematical sense) where you want your code to match the equations, but in those cases I just create a new offset-index and work off that. (edit: just learned from another comment that Julia supports custom indices.)
Note: caveat -- my use of indices is mathematical. I don't do any kind of low-level stuff.
I know the arguments for 0 vs 1 indexing, but in practice it's not really an issue since they're both just book-keeping. The only time where things might get interesting is for certain complex recursive expressions (recursive in the mathematical sense) where you want your code to match the equations, but in those cases I just create a new offset-index and work off that. (edit: just learned from another comment that Julia supports custom indices.)
Note: caveat -- my use of indices is mathematical. I don't do any kind of low-level stuff.