I think I agree with that article. I'm used to seeing "indices" in a mathematical context, referring to an object that labels a particular subobject of another object.

It seems a lot like the difference between "vertices" and "nodes" in a graph. Go to the math department, and you'll hear people talking about vertices. Walk down the hall to the CS department, and it's all nodes, all the time.

I have no idea why this is, but I suspect some kind of cultural thing. Maybe the CS term and the math term originated independently? Kind of like how you talk about machine learning in CS, but a good portion of ML would actually be classified as statistics by the math and stats departments.

Thanks! This read was more interesting than the crypto article