> The 1980s were not a particularly enlightened time for programming language design; and Dijkstra's opinions seem to carry extra weight mainly because his name

> The 1980s were not a particularly enlightened time for programming language design; and Dijkstra's opinions seem to carry extra weight mainly because his name has a certain shock and awe factor. Zero based indexing had nothing to do with Dijkstra's opinion but the practical realities of hardware, memory addressing and assembly programming. > I'm sure there is a culture that counts their first finger as 0 Not a one because zero as a concept was discovered many millenia after humans began counting.