No, it really doesn't. This is a constant headache in Lua too. See Dijkstra's comments on the subject here: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW...
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
+-----+-----+-----+-----+
0 1 2 3 4
I'm not going to tackle whether Djikstra was right or wrong, but merely to point out that there's more to Smalltalk's indexing than meets the eye.
For what it's worth: I'm not a professional Smalltalk dev by any stretch of the imagination, but I've written enough Smalltalk to tell you that you very rarely deal with the indices, anyway. Nearly all Smalltalk code ends up just using comprehensions to navigate collections. Of the remainder, they're such trivial cases that the 1-based indexing is intuitive and does not bother me the way that it does in, say, Lua or really old Turbo Pascal programs where some coder got a bit too slap-happy on arbitrarily bounded arrays.
I don't refer to the first inch of a ruler as inch 0 or inch 1, I refer to it as the first inch.
There are two things being described which I think is a set up for confusion and the many off by one errors that I've seen as a result.
1. Coordinate.
2. Interval.
But, in my list of 2 items, I index with 1 and 2, not 0 and 1. But, be sure that the first item is 1.0 not 1.1 and the second item is 2.0 not 2.1.
The natural numbers are generally considered to start at 1. Therefore, to people in general, such a system makes more sense.
Zero is not a "natural" number, in fact many societies / civilizations never even understood or used zero in arithmetic [1].
Yeah, but those societies were uniformly terrible at math.
If I hold up my fingers to indicate elements in an array, zero fingers means the array is empty. One finger is then, naturally, the first item: of index 1.
Counting elements starting at zero (for the first element) is still unnatural...
And you only need 1...N to order N bins and their contents.
Of course, most programmers don't have math degrees and I'd suspect that most people indeed think 1st element of an array starts at 1.
ARGHL!