That sounds more like a linked list than an array.
In C, an array is just contiguous bytes, and you reach an index through math (starting location + (index * size)).
Pretty sure lots of languages still do this to some degree, as your lookup times are effectively zero, though altering the number of elements is way more complex/expensive than in a linked list.
> and you reach an index through math (starting location + (index * size)).
By the way, that's the only reason why C-derived languages use unintuitive zero-based indexing. There's really no other reason to call the first element a[0] instead of a[1].
Ah, but is it unintuitive though? Once one understands that in the vast majority of cases, C deals in pointers, not arrays, it makes perfect sense that indexing uses an offset rather than the nth element.
Yes, but that's only C. Languages that have no pointer arithmetic (JavaScript, Python, Java, Rust, Go you name it) got that from C even though they didn't have to.
The index of the first element is always 0 plus the index of the first element. This means it sort-of doesn't matter what the index of the first element of the array is - but, viewed another way, it's an excellent argument for 0. Starting at 0 means you don't need to add a constant in the (very common) case of dealing with a subarray that starts at the first element of the containing array.
Yep, exactly. My point is all that is about pointer arithmetic, even though most higher-level languages don't provide you with pointer arithmetic (and their arrays may have nonzero memory offsets anyway).
Pascal, Julia, R, Lua use more natural 1-based, where you call the first element first.
But the first element is first whatever index you choose. Why 1, rather than, say, 99, or -3?
(You should ideally be able to choose any of these options, and others - e.g., 5, 7, -200, 14,771,589,734,598,742,923,574,835, etc. - because they all make exactly as much logical sense as 1 does and any of them is as elegant a choice as 1 is. But if you get no choice, it absolutely has to be 0, because it's the only non-arbitrary option. No other number guarantees to do nothing to the value you add it to!)