[Numpy-discussion] Help Understanding Indexing Behavior

[JB]

At the risk of igniting a flame war...can someone please help me understand
the indexing behavior of NumPy? I will readily I admit I come from a Matlab
background, but I appreciate the power of Python and am trying to learn more. 

>From a Matlab user's perspective, the behavior of indexing in NumPy seems
very bizarre. For example, if I define an array: 

x = np.array([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10])

If I want the first 5 elements, what do I do? Well, I say to myself, Python
is zero-based, whereas Matlab is one-based, so if I want the values 1 - 5,
then I want to index 0 - 4. So I type: x[0:4]

And get in return: array([1, 2, 3, 4]). So I got the first value of my
array, but I did not get the 5th value of the array. So the "start" index
needs to be zero-based, but the "end" index needs to be one-based. Or to put
it another way, if I type x[4] and x[0:4], the 4 means different things
depending on which set of brackets you're looking at!

It's hard for me to see this as anything by extremely confusing. Can someone
explain this more clearly. Feel free to post links if you'd like. I know
this has been discussed ad nauseam online; I just haven't found any of the
explanations satisfactory (or sufficiently clear, at any rate).