I believe the main argument (from the OP) is that you have to specify the range with two bounds, and that it is common to want a 0 (assuming a 0-based indexing

I believe the main argument (from the OP) is that you have to specify the range with two bounds, and that it is common to want a 0 (assuming a 0-based indexing world), and so in order to refer to a range that includes index 0 you'll need to use a number that is not in the set of valid indexes to define the bound. I would note that the argument is weakened when you look at the later bound, since you have the same problem there, it's just more subtle and less commonly encountered -- yet it routinely creates security bugs! It's because we don't work with integers, we work with fixed-size intervals within the set of integers (usually a power of two consecutive integers). So `for (i = 0; i < 256; i++)` is just weird when you're using 8-bit integers: your upper range is an inexpressible value, and could easily be compiled down to `for (i = 0; i < 0; i++)` with two's complement, eg if you did `uint8_t upper = 256; for (uint8_t i = 0; i < upper; i++)`. That case is simple, but it gets nastier when you are trying to properly check for overflow in advance and the actual upper value is computed. `if (n >= LIMIT) { return error; }` doesn't work if your LIMIT is based on the representable range. Nor does `if (n * elementSize >= LIMIT) { return error; }`. Even doing `limit = LIMIT / elementSize; if (n >= limit) { return error; }` requires doing the `LIMIT / elementSize` intermediate calculation in larger-width numbers. (In addition to the off-by-one if LIMIT is not evenly divisible by elementSize.) So when dealing with overflow checks, 0 ≤ i ≤ N may be better. Well, a little better. `for (i = 0; i <= LIMIT; i++)` could easily be an infinite loop if LIMIT is the largest in-domain value. You want `i = 0; while (true) do { ...stuff...; if (i == LIMIT) break; i++; }` and at that point, you've lost all simple correspondence with mathematical ranges. > Isn't it obvious that there is no universally correct way to index things? I don't know about "obvious", but I agree that there is no universally correct way to index things.