Why would you need any special case? If 1 means there is 1 item then you can still use 0 to mean there are 0 items. The 1-based counting would be to index or l

Why would you need any special case? If 1 means there is 1 item then you can still use 0 to mean there are 0 items. The 1-based counting would be to index or label them like item 1, item 2, item 3, ... which is quite natural to humans. If you had zero items, you'd express that by your list being empty, not by having a number 0 somewhere. It's not a special case.