But it is an excellent example of thoughtful reasoning to choose between multiple (seemingly arbitrary) design options. I think we all benefit when language (and API) designers are as thoughtful as this.
Dijkstra deals with what index start with as well, but it comes out as a consequence of which bounds to choose for a range, so it's rather short.
From the article:
When dealing with a sequence of length N, the elements of which we wish to distinguish by subscript, the next vexing question is what subscript value to assign to its starting element. Adhering to convention a) yields, when starting with subscript 1, the subscript range 1 ≤ i < N+1; starting with 0, however, gives the nicer range 0 ≤ i < N.