What's the point of firstindex in Julia?

Question

From documentation it says firstindex() finds the first index of a collection. Why not just use 1? What could be the case when it's not 1?

Answer 1

The first index is not necessarily 1 because Julia supports custom indexing. To understand why it is useful, you can't beat Tim Holy's blog post.

Custom indices allow you to encode information about your data in the indexing pattern itself: sometimes it is more natural to start counting from one, sometimes from zero, sometimes from some more arbitrary number.

Other times, such as when you are writing generic algorithms, you do not really care about the specific index. In which case you can use abstractions such as firstindex, lastindex, and eachindex.

Most often, it is better to avoid referring to an index altogether and just iterate over a collection's elements (e.g. for x in xs).

Julia allows you to use the most effective strategy for your data.

Answer 2

There are special array types like for example OffsetArrays.jl which can have arbitrary indices.