Zero or One based collection? Eric Gunnerson from Microsoft has been a blogging machine lately... and covers a question someone recently asked which is why in today's modern programming world do we still have 0 based instead of 1 based arrays... after all, when humans start counting, we start at 1... not 0.

Understanding how zero-based indexing works is the secret handshake of the programming world. We all started not knowing the secret handshake, but over time we learned and even began to like the secret handshake, and now we don't know any other way to shake hands.

Or as one of my professors in college used to say... 0 is a perfectly good number... so why not use it?