• Username@feddit.org
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    5 months ago

    It was not randomly decided. Even before arrays as a language concept existed, you would just store objects in continuous memory.

    To access you would do $addr+0, $addr+1 etc. The index had to be zero-based or you would simply waste the first address.

    Then in languages like C that just got a little bit of syntactic sugar where the ‘[]’ operator is a shorthand for that offset. An array is still just a memory address (i.e. a pointer).