>>I've been thinking about this this morning. Who invented the zero based approach, which applies to a lot of things in several development environments, including, among others, .NET. This is always a waste of time trying to understand/find which one applies to a specific component. I mean, when I start counting, I start at 1, right? lol
>
>When I did AutoCoder on IBM 1401s and BAL on 360s you got used to referencing characters and so on by the offset from the base address. I'm pretty sure the same referencing was present in all assembly language programming from day one. Apparently somebody wasn't bright enough (decision by committee) to eliminate that counter intuitive feature from higher level languages.

While I agree that for most "biz arrays" starting with 1 is better, in character coding when done with the python slicing
working off zero based strings makes often sense - and I grew up using to pascal and later vfp strings,
which are both not zero based - and hated the string mess in C and was not too happy with strings in Java and Modula2.

YMMV <g>

thomas