So Why do Arrays start at Index 0?

An Intuitive Counter-Intuition

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

At first glance, the use of 0 in many software languages to describe the index of the initial element of an array doesn’t make much sense. In the physical world, if you have a set of items, we use the word “first” (linked with the number 1) to describe the element at the beginning, not “zeroth”. In fact, zero has a unique meaning separate from other…