An unexpected takeaway: Michael Chastain's time-traveling debugging framework, which he had in 1995, and which still reads like sci-fi from the future[1].

Alas, this quote will probably stay relevant for a while:

>[We keep] finding programming constructs, ideas and approaches we call part of “modern” programming if we attempt them at all, sitting abandoned in 45-year-old demo code for dead languages.

[1]http://lwn.net/1999/0121/a/mec.html

Then the second parts quotes the creator of BCPL, revealing – a-HA! – what we already knew, that the array is a pointer to the first element and the index is the offset from the pointer, and that's why it's zero.

(And after that it veers of into complaining about how the papers documenting this history cost too much money, so they didn't actually read them.)

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF

I also thought I'd seen a longer text focusing more on the counting/indexing.

I still don't see the appeal of "element at zero offset" vs simply "first element".

I do agree that < vs <= etc can get messy. But outside of now fairly archaic programming languages I don't see the need. Just use a construct that handles ranges, like "for each element in collection/range/etc". (Or for math, "pattern matching" (or "for n in 1..m").