Comment by Rochus

It's funny that nearly half of all comments are below your comment. The topic seems to unsettle people much more than a new programming language. This is also another example of how a downvote button is primarily misused in practice.

> Arrays should start and end at whatever start index is required

That's what you were indeed able to do with Pascal and also Modula-2, but with Oberon, Wirth came to the conclusion, that other index ranges than 0..n-1 were not needed. In his 1988 paper "From Modula to Oberon" he considers it "inessential" and providing "hardly any additional expressive power", but causing "a hidden computational effort that is incommensurate with the supposed gain in convenience". I think, in the end, it is in the eye of the beholder.