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Comment by jfager | Hacker News Reader

Matlab, Octave, Mathematica, and other mathematical programming environments use 1-based indexing, it's a well-established norm for the domain.

Fortran too and in HPC we all code in Fortran a lot. Look at the loop construct:

     for i = 1:t

in Fortran:

     DO I=1,T

The ability to load both C and Fortran dynamic libraries is also really really nice.

Does 1-based indexing have any advantage, beyond familiarity to scientists?

Not really, but it's not important either way.

With 1-based indexing, length == last index.

Does 0-based indexing have any advantage, beyond ability to do pointer arithmetic with indexes?

In 0-based indexing, n % length is a value inside the range.