Comment by Animats

Depends on whether you're measuring or counting.

The article mentions Mesa's interval syntax, which gave programmers all the possible options:

[1..100] (0 .. 101) [1 .. 101) [1 .. 101)

were all the same interval, 1 to 100 inclusive. Bad idea. Great way to get off-by-one errors.

Another bad idea from that era - Wirth's insistence that you shouldn't be allowed compile-time arithmetic in Pascal. Like.

    const
        tabsize = 100;

    var 
        tab: array [0..tabsize-1] of integer; { NOT ALLOWED }

No, you had to have a separate named constant for "tabsize-1", and it couldn't be initialized as "tabsize-1", either.