This is silly. Different domains have different needs. If you think of arrays as pointer + offset calculation, and your only for loop has an explicit index incr

This is silly. Different domains have different needs. If you think of arrays as pointer + offset calculation, and your only for loop has an explicit index increment in it, then starting at 0 is natural. If you are a systems programmer then a language targeting you should accommodate that. If you are anyone who doesn't want to care (too much) about how things are implemented, then it's a lot less error prone to mark the 1st element of an array a[1]. Having taught and written fairly complex scientific code in both 0 and 1 indexed languages, there really is no good reason to do anything else. for a in array[3:6] Should iterate over the third to sixth element of the array.