They map well to practically freakin' everything, for what seems like.. not that much effort on the language design side, but an enormous amount of tedious, duplicated effort on the user side.
So a language with multidimensional arrays is in a lose-lose position of having to choose to either satisfy the linear algebraists at the cost of alienating general-purpose programmers who want to do pointer arithmetic, or else satisfy the latter while alienating the core demographic for multidimensional numeric arrays.
Personally, I’m fine with (or even slightly prefer) one-based for my own scientific computing, despite starting with C, since it really is more elegant for linear algebra, and I have never found myself needing or wanting to do pointer arithmetic in a language that does have good multidimensional arrays — but clearly it is still a major turn-off to many others.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48562873/zero-indexed-ar...
I would imagine this support to be stomachable if it was active at all times but using a visually different syntax for 0-based and 1-based indexing, maybe using something like the guillemet for the latter (like this: «1») that is wild enough to draw the user's attention when reading the code, and not common/prominent enough across keyboard layouts to make most users think twice before using it when writing code unless it makes sense for the domain.
Matrix operations were first class.
You could declare the array as array[0..100] of something resp. array[1..100] of something for 0/1 based, and just as well do array[2..100] of something, or array[-1..100] of something, for -1/2 based.
Or with letters array['a'..'z'] of something,
Or with enums. TEnum = (red, blue, green), and then an array array[red..green] of something
Actually, that is just Pascal
It would wreak havoc on the programming side though. Have you ever worked on a code base with more than a few people? Have you ever had to deal with different preferences programmers have? Differences in opinion between smart, slightly (or not so slightly) non-social people?
Using 0 or 1 indexed arrays, the new space vs tabs war! Or the new 2 spaces vs. 4 spaces vs. 8 spaces vs. using tabs war!
And thus specialized data type, operators and syntax look like overhead. And thus language designers leave it out.
Most languages that prioritize Fortran code interop also adopt column-major order, but most other languages that support multidimensional arrays do row-major order. I'm not sure why Fortran went column-major but because it did, a lot of libraries designed for Fortran callers (such as LAPACK and all BLAS implementations) need to be told that input arrays have been transposed when they come from languages like C++.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row-_and_column-major_order
The number of woeful ad-hoc solutions I've seen to people handling matrix data in Java/C# for what should've been otherwise very basic analysis ...
Something with pandas-like capability in a lower level language would be amazing.
More like numpy than pandas but I've used x-tensor (c++) with great success in several projects: https://xtensor.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html