>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.

This is one issue I had to be careful with when I migrated my VFP framework to .NET. I have many VFP functions which are now part of methods in classes and when doing the conversion, I had to make sure to know which ones where offset by 1 as oppose to VFP.