>That's interesting logic, Fabio and it probably is what the people who wrote the language had in mind.
>However when someone asks "What does 'ABC' begin with?", I will continue to answer "A", not "nothing."

How about zero-based arrays? To the question "with which element does the array begin" you'd have to say "zeroeth", IOW, the nothingth.

The "begins with" is actually not quite right. The definition is "are equal to the length of the right one". If the length of the right one is zero, well, their first zero characters ARE equal, so it returns .t. as per definition.