From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah)
Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2017 17:47:33 -0700
Subject: [TUHS] Array index history
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 07 Jun 2017 07:20:43 MDT."
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On Wed, 07 Jun 2017 07:20:43 MDT arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> Basically, until C came along, the standard practice was for indices
> to start at 1. Certainly Fortran and Pascal did it that way.

Pascal's array type syntax is

    array-type: "array" "[" index-type "]" "of" type

Index type could be an integer sub-range or scalar type or
scalar sub-range. Pascal doesn't allow specifying array size
with a simple integer so the question of default index for
first element doesn't arise.

In spite of having learned and used Pascal, PL/I, Fortran and
APL before C, a lower bound of 0 seemed most sensible to me.
Not because of any efficiency reasons but because of modular
arithmetic which I learned before C!