[hpcjoe]

I agree. There's far less of a cognitive load for developers associated with representing an expression as written, if you don't need to mess with indices, in order to accommodate the language and its vagaries.

One should not need to adjust the way one expresses an algorithm, because of opinionated language design decisions. Put another way, languages designed for scientific/engineering computing won't have a hard/fixed opinion about things that shouldn't be worried about.