Yet, I still admire the Lua creators for making this bold choice. Why should we use from-0 indexing for all eternity? Just because it's always been that way? This is a real question if you have the answer.
Well, we obviously can use 1-based indexing. Ada/VHDL allows you to define the ranges of your indicies even beyond 0 or 1 based (very useful in fixed point mathematics where you sometimes want to index your bits by a negative power of 2).
The big disadvantage is that you lose the algebraic properties of mapping to the ring of integers modulo N when your indicies are 1-based.
This leads to a bunch of off-by-one bugs in various places. One of the most pernicious is that while you can get to the next index with "next = prev % N + 1" you actually have to do "prev = (next - 1) % N". Note that the previous REQUIRES the parentheses due to precedence of operations.
0-based may be convention, but it isn't ill thought out. FORTRAN(1-based) and C(0-based) coexisted a LONG time. Pascal was(is?) 1-based. Most people had experience with both.
People who designed programming languages CHOSE the 0 convention. Overwhelmingly.
Here is the answer: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...
Lack of arity checks is definitely much more problematic than this, but still... if you can count the number of tragic design flaws in your language on one hand, you're in great shape compared to the rest of what's out there!