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It depends on which kind of maths you refer to.

After studying ordinal numbers, I feel like the normal way to start counting is from 0 (or the "empty set" ordinal).

This is also how you prove something by transfinite induction, you need to start by 0.

I wish I could easily recompile Julia so that it is 0-indexed. But then what about all the libraries...

Most well-written libraries do not depend on the specific type of indexing in an array. There's a strong convention for writing index-agnostic code, with eachindex(), enumerate(), firstindex(), lastindex(), begin, end, etc.

I try to write code to accept 0-, 1-, 2-, and StarWars-based indexing.

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