> > To contrast with, the IMO most unpleasant way of 
> approaching the index 
> > origin was done in  APL. There, you could set the system 
> variable _IO 
> > to either 0 or 1 (no other value accepted)
> 
> Perl has this too, though it's called $[.
> 
> Obviously, it isn't normally used and people assume the 
> default value of
> 0. :)

True! It seems that the Perl community (reasonably) assumes
that whoever fiddles with $[, so everyone assumes it to be
0, while in the APL world it was more common to expect that everyone
might change _IO...

Ronald