I underline what you said and add to it: I started with arrays with Fortran. There can pass an array as an argument to a parameter of a subroutine, and the su

I underline what you said and add to it: I started with arrays with Fortran. There can pass an array as an argument to a parameter of a subroutine, and the subroutine can address the darned array any way it wants. Why? Sure, maybe want to sort the array based on a slice here omitting details. Sure, such programming would need a lot of well done documentation and still is dangerous. And such array fooling around stands to get into trouble with compiler options to check array bounds. Then I did a lot with PL/I: There get arrays, structures, structures of arrays of structures of arrays, etc. Also get to set the lower and upper bounds of each array index to anything -- positive, negative, or zero, including during execution -- that can be represented in the usually 16 bit array indexing arithmetic. And, it turns out, all that array indexing, even for arrays of structures of arrays, etc., is just ordinary multi-dimensional array arithmetic -- nearly as useful as objects but with much simpler storage allocation and array indexing. And if look carefully at that arithmetic, then do see how to have any subscript (index) lower bounds and upper bounds with just trivial modification of the usual array indexing. And, yes, when I wrote C code, no way did I like the high emphasis on starting an array at index 0. Besides C doesn't even really support arrays, e.g., with several subscripts, and forces a programmer to write a macro or some such that does the arithmetic. And there are problems in a subroutine that receives such an array. And compiler support for checking array bounds is in trouble because the language syntax and semantics don't even support arrays with several dimensions. So, have to write, say, a matrix package that has a C structure for the details of number of dimensions and the upper/lower bounds for each dimension -- it works but get no compiler based debugging support or I/O support, and no doubt the compiler can't do some indexing optimizations that Fortran and PL/I can do because the data being used for the indexing is, in the semantics, not subject to being changed by the user's code during the indexing arithmetic. E.g., with PL/I, in the execution logic, each structure or array, each aggregate has a little table, a dope vector that describes the aggregate, yes, within a subroutine and within runtime subroutines, e.g., for doing I/O on the whole aggregate. PL/I was in good shape before C was developed. PL/I was used for the operating systems Multics and much of Primos. So, PL/I offers programmers much more than C and, still, is good for both applications and operating system code, especially in array indexing. Sorry, Dijkstra.