I'm guessing you don't translate algorithms in scientific papers. The reality is that having one notation for mathematics and programming is a convincing argum

I'm guessing you don't translate algorithms in scientific papers. The reality is that having one notation for mathematics and programming is a convincing argument to many. More broadly, this indexing thing is trivial. Let's not pretend Dijkstra's paper is proof of anything. At the end of the day his argument is just style: "That is ugly, so for the upper bound we prefer < as in a) and d)" http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831....