I often wonder if Dijkstra's arguments still hold sway, since algorithms written in modern languages differ greatly from those written when Dijkstra wrote this. Rather than writing hash functions or shortest route algorithms, a majority of my algorithms are centered around lists and or dictionary manipulations. There are still many situations where it makes more sense to start indexing at 0, but I wonder if it is still the majority of cases.
Well, I think that there is a very important human reason to keep sticking to 0 as the start: convention. It has always been this way. Changing it would cause a whole lot of weird bugs.
To be honest, I think one reason why this grew is probably the way C handles array indexing. a[0] = *(a + 0) and this symmetry is a nice property to have in many cases. I think I use that symmetry in my MSc project a lot more than I use vec_mule/vec_mulo.
(Yeah, I'm not of a fixed mind in this matter :-))
