Roberto Interview

[David Sicilia]

Title: "Creator of Lua: Scripting, Programming Languages, Predictions | Roberto Ierusalimschy"
Host: Ryan Peterman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCZnFKk6M9A

(I'm not affiliated with the channel, just putting it out there)

[jure bagic]

Banger, the 1-indexing crashout was legendary but also valid.

-- Jure

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[Luau Project]

Indeed. I am a mathematician and it would make more sense to me due how natural numbers are conceptually constructed in set theory.

Little comment: without going in too much details, in set theory, we have 0 = the empty set, 1 = { 0 }, 2 = { 0, 1 }, 3 = { 0, 1, 2 } and so on.

However, when I first saw 0-based indexing in languages derived from C years ago, I felt really intimidated. After years dealing with memory, it starts to make sense, but like Roberto said, it is unnatural for people out of the computer science umbrella.

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[jure bagic]

Right, even simpler, how can "first" element index be "zero".

In C there is no indexing or actual arrays with elements, it is just a block of memory and "indexing" is syntax sugar for pointer arithmetics. For C the index means the offset in a particular direction from the pointer (and the eventual dereference); here 0 as index is necessity not a feature.

In languages such as Lua, indexing is an actual instruction, supported by specific set of objects. However, everything copied C and so programmers expect 0 as the "first" element.

I am also guilty of this, my scripting language has lists and the first element is at index 0, oopsie. Not only this, because the language is based off of Lua, in the C API interface the first stack value is also at index 0, hehe (subject to change).

-- Jure

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[Sainan]

I wonder how much of an influence PHP had with Rasmus Lerdorf's initial approach of it being for quick prototyping "but actual code should still be in C/C++" so similarity to C/C++ made sense, and only later the focus shifted to general-purpose programming aka. "you can use these scripts to do anything and everything."

-- Sainan