Always beware the word should. I agree with Dijkstra's logic in the context that he presents it, but there are other contexts where I don't think it applies. P

Always beware the word should. I agree with Dijkstra's logic in the context that he presents it, but there are other contexts where I don't think it applies. Personally, I find that in compiler writing, which is the only programming I do these days, the only things I use indexes for are line numbers and character offsets into strings. Calling the first character the zeroth character is ridiculous to me, so I just store a leading 0 byte in all strings and then can use one based indexing with no performance hit. Alternatively, since I am the compiler writer, I could just internally store the pointer to the string - 1 to avoid the < 1 byte per string average overhead (I also machine word align strings so often the leading zero doesn't affect the string size in memory). If you are often directly working with array indices, you are likely doing low level programming. It is worth asking if the task at hand requires that, or if you would be better off using higher level constructs and/or a higher level language. Low level details ideally should not leak into the application level.