[copperx]

That goes against my intuition. Multiplication in hardware to this day relies on addition. Is one adder going to add an extra cycle? Or would that time be amortized? Take a look at slides 45-46 here. https://acg.cis.upenn.edu/milom/cis371-Spring08/lectures/04_...

Do you know the answer to that question? (I don't, but if someone does, it will settle this issue).

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I don't know, but looking at that 3-input add makes me think you may be right and the extra addition/subtraction could perhaps be combined into the multiplication.

OTOH, for arrays who's contents are size 2^n (char, short, int, long) I'm sure the generated code isn't using multiply in the first place.

Anyways, an optimizing compiler could certainly remove much of any overhead added by 1-based indexing .. for an array access in a for loop it could, if necessary, calculate the "base-1" address once at start of loop.

Personally, having grown up with assembler and C, and still using C++ today, I'm quite happy with 0-based.