Oh wow, that does make the non-standard array references rather catastrophic.

you wrap the host across the embedding boundary so that the host and lua can either use their own convention or have access to a special object that explicitely and clearly exposes the other convention.

In general using array indexes as foreign keys should always be considered carefully.

And if all you will be doing is iterating then the starting index doesn't really matter (unless you copy paste loop logic, which is a problem in itself)

Errata: you wrap the host across -> you wrap the array across