1-based indexing makes sense to computational scientists (target audience). Fortran, Matlab, etc. make very good use of that. Moreover, you can change to zero

1-based indexing makes sense to computational scientists (target audience). Fortran, Matlab, etc. make very good use of that. Moreover, you can change to zero based if you wish. So this "very big elephant" is, in reality, a nothingburger. For me, the very big elephant in the room is the semantic formatting. It has and continues to trip me up time and again. A touch of a space bar can change the flow of a python program. That is a huge asteroid of a problem.