Djikstra argued in favour of 0-based indexing and against 1-based indexing. Let’s just agree that if you’re arguing for 1-based indexing, you’d better have a pr

Djikstra argued in favour of 0-based indexing and against 1-based indexing. Let’s just agree that if you’re arguing for 1-based indexing, you’d better have a pretty fantastic argument. I think for FORTRAN or Julia, using 1-based indexing is a good idea, because most mathematical algorithms are written in notation using 1-based indices. As someone who spent a semester debugging subtle off-by-one errors and small differences in results in his scientific computing classes because I foolishly opted for C rather than FORTRAN, understand that converting algorithms with nested summations and integrators from one convention to another is painful. Lua should never have used 1-based indexing because it was meant to interface with C code which itself will have data structures that use 0-based indexing. Writing lua extensions for wireshark, for example, is incredibly painful just because of this.