Comment by Certhas

Argument by authority.

To me 1 based indexing is natural if you stop pretending that arrays are pointers + index arithmetics. Especially with slicing syntax.

It's one of the things that irked me when switching to Julia from Python but which became just obviously better after I made the switch.

E.g. in Julia `1:3` represents the numbers 1 to 3. `A[1]` is the first element of the array, `A[1:3]` is a slice containing the first to third element. `A[1:3]` and `A[4:end]` partitions the array. (As an aside: `For i in 1:3` gives the number 1, 2, 3.)

The same sentence in python:

`1:3` doesn't make sense on its own. `A[0]` is the first element of the array. `A[0:3]` gives the elements `A[0], A[1]` and `A[2]`. `A[0:3]` and `A[3:]` slice the array.

For Python, which follows Dijkstra for its Slice delimiters, I need to draw a picture for beginners (I feel like the numpy documentation used to have this picture, but not anymore). The Julia option requires you to sometimes type an extra +1 but it's a meaningful +1 ("start at the next element") and even beginners never get this wrong.

That said, it seems to me that for Lua, with the focus on embedding in the C world, 0 index makes more sense.