1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
Accepted Solutions
The perfect Mathcad work-sheet is the Mathcad work-sheet with arrays and strings variables where the answer is not depended on ORIGIN value!
Not M^<1> but M^<ORIGIN+1> etc.
Linear algebra:
In USA ORIGIN = 0
In Europe (in Russia too) ORIGIN = 1
In the World (0+1)/2=0.5
A compromise ORIGIN:=0.5 - why not? 
Valery Ochkov wrote:
The perfect Mathcad work-sheet is the Mathcad work-sheet with arrays and strings variables where the answer is not depended on ORIGIN value!
Not M^<1> but M^<ORIGIN+1> etc.
Agreed!
Linear algebra:
In USA ORIGIN = 0
In Europe (in Russia too) ORIGIN = 1
In the World (0+1)/2=0.5
A compromise ORIGIN:=0.5 - why not?
Love your sense of humour!
Alan
It would be better to fix ORIGIN = 1
In a way I agree with this.
Doesn't look right.
Mike
Mike Armstrong wrote:
It would be better to fix ORIGIN = 1In a way I agree with this.
Doesn't look right.
Mike
A number of programming languages allow each array to have its own index bounds, chosen so as to reflect some characteristic of the data or context; for example, one may want to index an array by latitude or temperature but only over some subset of allowable values. It's always possible to map the desired index to a 0/1 based index, but it is often more convenient (and less error-prone) to use the 'true' index.
This opens up the possibility for all kinds of user-defined origins, such as time origins being based on a calendar, for example, operating system time (eg, Unix), religious time (eg, Ussher) or cosmological time (eg, big-bang ... or steady-state 
) - the latter particularly appeals to me as I think this notion of a fixed origin is somewhat quaint and old-fashioned, or indeed unique origin. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be, but I have fond memories of writing some microcode (on a bit-slice microprocessor) that changed the meaning of the 'user' machine code every so often.
Stuart
Its seems to be down to personnel preference, so yes the user should have the choice.
(on a bit-slice microprocessor)
Showing your age now 
Mike
Personally, I am so used to zero based indexing that it does look right 
I use zero based indexing without even thinking about it anymore. Most of the languages I have written in or still write in default to zero based arrays (or even allow nothing else), so that is my preference. I would probably be just as happy with 1 based arrays if the majority of languages used that, and that is what I was used to, but that's not the case. And the worst possible scenario would be to have to mentally switch between the two conventions every time I switched language. I would not want to have to write in VBscript, Java, C and it's later variants, Python, etc, all using zero based arrays, and then in Mathcad using 1 based arrays. That would lead to a lot of errors!
Personally, I am so used to zero based indexing that it does look right
It looks right to me and probably most Mathcad users. I actually get a little thrown out when checking through work from this forum and the index has been changed.
The problem I have is when I calculate reactions for example and then want to indicate them on a sketch. Reaction zero looks a little weird and it has been queried by non-Mathcad user before now.
Mike
