Comment by saurik

The reason why 0 makes sense for pointers isn't due to some arcane implementation detail of programming but because of how one conceptualizes ranges and distance and pointers just so happen to be a place where that comes up very directly in programming. Any time you attempt to develop an algorithm that needs to think about multiple ranges of a collection at the same time or needs to scale ranges through a collection, 1-based indexing causes you to have to throw in a bunch of +/-1 compensation factors to prevent you from double-counting or scaling past an edge. Life is just too short to have to constantly debug the issues that come from 1-based indexing when developing complex algorithms, even if it means beginners feel a bit confused by "counting from 0".