Python "why" questions

[Roald de Vries]

On Aug 7, 2010, at 2:54 PM, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> On Sat, 07 Aug 2010 13:48:32 +0200
> News123 <news1234 at free.fr> wrote:
>> It makes sense in assembly language and even in many byte code  
>> languages.
>> It makes sense if you look at the internal representation of unsigned
>> numbers (which might become an index)
>>
>> For a complete beginner common sense dictates differently and there
>> might be confusion why the second element in a list has index 1.
>
> Would said beginner also be surprised that a newborn baby is zero  
> years
> old or would it be more natural to call them a one year old?  Zero
> based counting is perfectly natural.

A new born baby is in his/her first year. It's year 1 of his/her life.  
For this reason, also "the year 0" doesn't exist. From the fact that a  
baby can be half a year old, you derive that arrays should have floats  
as indices?