Why? From one of Roberto Ierusalimschy's talks (starts at slide 6): http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/%7Eroberto/talks/ws2011.pdf http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/%7Eroberto/

Why? From one of Roberto Ierusalimschy's talks (starts at slide 6): http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/%7Eroberto/talks/ws2011.pdf http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/%7Eroberto/talks/ws2011.pdf Excerpt: - Not all languages are 0-based: Icon, Fortran, AWK1, and Smalltalk are 1-based; Snobol, Pascal, Modula, Modula-32, and Ada have configurable bases. - Currently, many languages are 0-based due to influence from C. - Ironically, none of them share the reason that made C 0-based (where a[e] means *(a+e)). 1-based arrays: - Much more intuitive: first is 1st (not 0th). ISO-C: “E1[E2] designates the E2-th element of E1 (counting from zero).” - Much easier for non programmers. Easy for (good) programmers :) - Historical reason: Fortran used 1-based arrays, and most first users of Lua had a Fortran background.