>>12
array indices starting at zero is usually really confusing for a beginning programmer, so making them start at one makes one less thing for a newbie to get tripped up on. Indices that start at zero are more important to have in a language that allows arbitrary pointer arithmetic. It makes more sense in that situation for a pointer to an array to point to the first element in the array. But this type of access isn't really allowed in python,java,ect, and there wouldn't be that much of a difference if the indices started at 1 instead of 0.