> Array indexing is such a core thing and I don't understand why anything mathematical or scientific would start with 1. Counting things is such a core thing t

> Array indexing is such a core thing and I don't understand why anything mathematical or scientific would start with 1. Counting things is such a core thing to humans that when we have a bunch of N things we think of them as thing #1 to thing #N. We start counting from 1, not 0. Indexing from 0 in computing is adapting the human mind to the computer, purely for performance reasons that may have been relevant in the 50s or 60s but were beginning to be obsolete by the 70s. It was done so you could access elements of an array by the simplest possible calculation of your offset into heap memory. When your first element is stored at Starting_address, you need i for that first element to be = 0, just so you don't need to have the compiler add another constant term for each element to "Element is at Starting_address + i * sizeof(element)". Would have been trivial, even then (as Wirth showed) to add that constant term calculation to compilers, but it was done without in C because that eliminated one whole integer operation from each (set of?) array access(es). In stead, we got the mental gymnastics of for(i=0, i++, i<=N-1) {...} and its many variations (in stead of just for i := 1 to N...), which surely have caused orders of magnitude more headaches in off-by-one bugs over the years than it saved on performance.