I dislike 1-based indexing, but I also don't really care that much. In my experience, people react with disgust to it, then get used to it, and still prefer 0-b

I dislike 1-based indexing, but I also don't really care that much. In my experience, people react with disgust to it, then get used to it, and still prefer 0-based but discover that 1-based isn't all that much more awkward in practice. You get used to it pretty quickly when the whole language is built around it. I solved the immutable table thing by encoding my tables to CBOR in the canonical representation. The same table structure always encodes to the same CBOR. I did have to write my own CBOR encoder, though, because the existing art wasn't good enough.