>It goes back to C or even before. It has never seemed that weird to me because my first programming language was assembler, in which displacements are everything. You offset from the base register address so many bytes and that's where the action is. Adding 1 to make it more understandable in everyday terms would just add unneeded operations in the CPU.
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>BTW, my post just now about Wikipedia reminded me that I am currently lapsed in my UT membership. I will rectify that when I pay the bills later this weekend. I have no idea how much income the site brings you but do know you pour your soul into it and have to put up with a lot of aggravation ;-)

Yes, I guess it is all related to low level programming register approach. Thanks for the upcoming renewal