"And anyway, isn't the "corporate religion" these days to start with 0, since this as what the big mainstream languages does? " Exactly this. Our firm had been

"And anyway, isn't the "corporate religion" these days to start with 0, since this as what the big mainstream languages does? " Exactly this. Our firm had been forced to change numbering of real-life items from 1-based to 0-based, because some cargo-cultist somewhere was amazed by the offsets and addresses and wanted to force this numbering scheme everywhere. Now there is a code inside that converts 1-based items to 0-based for legacy stuff, and we are still finding bugs caused by that. Every day to day operations are artificially harder because understanding what is actually unit number 1 or port number 2 is hard now, just like counting total number of anything and remembering to add 1 afterwards. But now we get to have a hype 0-based everything system, which nobody asked for. In some cases this can lead to such awesome combos like physical ports numbered 1-based, then 3rd party switch with 0-based, then Linux interface on top 1-based, then our config on top 0-based. Amazing and convenient, isn't it?:)