[isogon]

In my view, the fact that a[b] is equivalent to *(a + b) in C and C++ (in most languages with arrays the latter notation is meaningless) is a sort of a neat coincidence which we shouldn't feel bound to in language design in general.

There are many reasons to depart from this idea in languages far removed pointer arithmetic. For example, Julia has 1-based indexing and I appreciate it for that when doing computational mathematics. It is closer to familiar notation: A[1][1] is the element of matrix A in row 1 and column 1. In a language with zero-based indexing, it is sometimes easier for me to allocate an extra row and column, wasting memory, than to shift indices and risk an inevitable off-by-one somewhere.