> We usually start to count from one. When a baby completes its first roundtrip around the Sun, they’re one year old, not zero years old.
And before they complete the first trip, they're 0 years old, showing that you start from a count of 0. The one is the result from the first increment.
If I ask you to count the number of red balls in a bag with only 3 yellow balls, then the initial count in your head is 0, you inspect the balls one by one, never encountering a red ball, and thus never incrementing the count. And then you pronounce your final count of 0. So that's counting starting from 0.
What you call "starting at 1" is not so much the start as it is the first increment, which need not arise.
For arrays, the first element is the difference between a size 0 array and a size 1 array. So the choice between 0-indexed and 1-indexed is like the difference between pre-increment and post-increment. Do we associate the element with the array size up to the element, or to the array size up to and including the element? The choice seems arbitrary
(personally I prefer using the same range of non-negative numbers for both, but language has a bias for associating "first" with index 1).
And before they complete the first trip, they're 0 years old, showing that you start from a count of 0. The one is the result from the first increment.
If I ask you to count the number of red balls in a bag with only 3 yellow balls, then the initial count in your head is 0, you inspect the balls one by one, never encountering a red ball, and thus never incrementing the count. And then you pronounce your final count of 0. So that's counting starting from 0.
What you call "starting at 1" is not so much the start as it is the first increment, which need not arise.
For arrays, the first element is the difference between a size 0 array and a size 1 array. So the choice between 0-indexed and 1-indexed is like the difference between pre-increment and post-increment. Do we associate the element with the array size up to the element, or to the array size up to and including the element? The choice seems arbitrary (personally I prefer using the same range of non-negative numbers for both, but language has a bias for associating "first" with index 1).