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Some colleagues and I were comparing past languages we had programmed in and were talking about our experience with VBScript with its odd features such as 1-based index instead of 0-based indexes like almost every other language has, the reasoning being that it was a language for users (e.g. Excel VBA) instead of a language for developers. Then someone said, " XPath also has 1-based indexes " which I couldn't believe until I found this article in which many reasons are given in favor of the 0-based approach including some from Michael Kay himself: "...zero-based indexing tends to make the index formulae simpler when accessing a multi-dimensional array with a one-dimensional array access expression" "when handling tables, or subscripting into strings, zero-based addressing would often be much more convenient" "...hardware addressing is not the only benefit of 0-based addressing ... it also makes computations easier..." but then Michael Kay is quoted as concluding: ...1-based logic was the right choice for XPath and XSLT...because the language was designed for users, not for programmers, and users still have this old-fashioned habit of referring to the first chapter in a book as Chapter One... Can someone explain that to me? (1) How is XPath designed for users? I can't imagine anyone who is not a developer wrangling with the syntactical rigidity of XPath or the declarative/functional-programming-aspects of XSLT. and (2) Why really did the creators of XPath go against the norm of modern programming languages by choosing a 1-based index?

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