Comment by lucasoshiro

> I guess one might argue that 1-based indexing could cause beginners to get confused when they move to another language.

The creator of Lua once visited my university, he told us about the 1-indexing (it looked like this is the thing that everybody asks him). Lua was created in a time that 0-indexed languages wasn't so dominant over the 1-based languages.

Lua is older than Java and JS, and a few years newer than Perl and Python. Before those, as far as I remember about more popular languages: C and C++ are 0-indexed; COBOL, MATLAB and FORTRAN are 1-indexed; Pascal can be 0 or 1 indexed, but its for loop is better suited for 1-indexed.

This way, there wasn't a strong bias to use 0-index in a new language as we have today, they could use what made more sense. Since it was created for engineers used to math notation (sum, products and matrices generally are 1-indexed) and without background in programming, they have chosen to start in 1.

*However*, about using Lua for studying algorithms and data structures, some books use 1-indexed arrays in their pseudocode, notably CLRS' Introduction to Algorithms. When I was studying algorithm analysis using CLRS I used Lua to implement them. I still prefer 0-indexed languages, though.