> If you pick x86 or amd64 as your benchmark, then you're going to get a very narrow picture.
99% of the language designers I know target x86 first and foremost. But in the given link only one person mentioned x86, while others were speaking generally and voiced an opinion that it really doesn’t matter.
I take your point that other designers might have other pressures, but the choice of 1 vs 0 in the common case (not a narrow slice as you seem to suggest) comes down to other factors. The pressure to conform to developer expectations for 0-based indexing is much greater than anything else; as demonstrated in this HN thread, some people won’t even consider using a language if it has 1-based indexing. Other communities face persistent confusion with 0-based indexing. That provides far more pressure than the ARM instruction set for language devs that I know. Maybe the ones you know feel differently.
Your point is taken on bigendian vs littlendian, but the same has not happened for indexing. Languages haven’t settle on either, but instead they have bifurcated between dev targeted versus end user targeted languages, with the former being 0 based and the latter being 1 based.
99% of the language designers I know target x86 first and foremost. But in the given link only one person mentioned x86, while others were speaking generally and voiced an opinion that it really doesn’t matter.
I take your point that other designers might have other pressures, but the choice of 1 vs 0 in the common case (not a narrow slice as you seem to suggest) comes down to other factors. The pressure to conform to developer expectations for 0-based indexing is much greater than anything else; as demonstrated in this HN thread, some people won’t even consider using a language if it has 1-based indexing. Other communities face persistent confusion with 0-based indexing. That provides far more pressure than the ARM instruction set for language devs that I know. Maybe the ones you know feel differently.
Your point is taken on bigendian vs littlendian, but the same has not happened for indexing. Languages haven’t settle on either, but instead they have bifurcated between dev targeted versus end user targeted languages, with the former being 0 based and the latter being 1 based.