It was not randomly decided. Even before arrays as a language concept existed, you would just store objects in continuous memory.
To access you would do $addr+0, $addr+1 etc. The index had to be zero-based or you would simply waste the first address.
Then in languages like C that just got a little bit of syntactic sugar where the ‘[]’ operator is a shorthand for that offset. An array is still just a memory address (i.e. a pointer).
I know. But in the alternate reality where we’d been using 1-based indices forever you’d be telling me how useful it is that the first element is “1” instead of zero and I’d be saying there are some benefits to using zero based index because it’s more like an offset than an index.
It was not randomly decided. Even before arrays as a language concept existed, you would just store objects in continuous memory.
To access you would do $addr+0, $addr+1 etc. The index had to be zero-based or you would simply waste the first address.
Then in languages like C that just got a little bit of syntactic sugar where the ‘[]’ operator is a shorthand for that offset. An array is still just a memory address (i.e. a pointer).
I know. But in the alternate reality where we’d been using 1-based indices forever you’d be telling me how useful it is that the first element is “1” instead of zero and I’d be saying there are some benefits to using zero based index because it’s more like an offset than an index.