> One thing that annoys me about closed ranges (and it's not much talked about) is that it is impossible to express the empty range: in python [i:i] is an empty range, while closed ranges always contain at least one element. That makes closed ranges strictly less expressive than half-open ranges, making often necessary to write special cases for zero-length.

In matlab/octave you can write an empty range as a(i:i-1). Not to say that that's at all elegant or aesthetically appealing, but it does work. But I 100% agree with the sentiment; one of my favorite things about using NumPy rather than matlab in my research code is the vastly superior indexing, in large part due to the fact that it's 0-based. matlab's indexing really is painful and off-by-one-error prone for doing anything other than a(1:n).