a lot of people would protest. There are of course more than two colors. For example “red, green, blue” are already three. Okay so maybe the statement was an exaggeration. How about “only 5 colors” (Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet)? Some people might start to agree with that statement. Other people might list a few more. At some point words for more colors will run out. Yet some people would still disagree with the statement: “there are only x colors”. Even though we only have a finite number of words for them.

Communism is not a bad economic system. It is not an economic system.

Every economic system is fundamentally an allocation algorithm. Somehow it must be decided what is produced, and who can use/consume that. An economic system is the “recipe” (algorithm) for making this decision. If you specify such an algorithm, you can make statements about the result.

While most programming languages use 0-based indexing some people are not convinced that this is a good thing and not just the legacy of the language C. They argue that starting to index with one is more intuitive than starting to index with zero, and that there is no good reason to use 0-based indices besides pointer arithmetic which should not be of concern to higher level programming.

And to be fair, proponents of zero based indexing have mostly failed to provide a convincing argument for their preference (Dijkstra’s range argument aside). To remedy this, I am going to present 5 arguments for 0-based indexing and address the intuition argument of 1-based indexing.

It seems fitting that the first article of a blog should layout the foundation of my beliefs. So…