Older versions of Perl allowed you to set a lexically-scoped array base integer. It defaulted to zero and the docs mentioned 1-based arrays, but IIRC it could be any integer. This was deprecated several years ago in 5.12 as a harmful practice. Specifying using features of a Perl version of 5.16 or newer actually makes assigning to it (except for 0) a compile-time error.

Interestingly, though, Perl’s native arrays are decidedly not an array of primitives. They are arrays of scalar values, and a scalar value can not only contain a character, a string, an integer, a float, or a reference to another item (scalar, hash, array, blessed object, filehandle, etc) but it can return different values when called in a numeric context vs a string context. There are certainly ways to get at primitive values, but it’s not in Perl’s native array semantics.