[stan_rogers]

Indeed, zero-based indexing is sort of a ridiculous concession to the hardware (whether that be data/address line labelling by power of two or offsets from a memory location) if bit-twiddling isn't your goal. (Even binary operations don't necessarily imply bit-twiddling at the conceptual level, even if that's what's going on under the hood.) We've just become rather used to counting by calling the first thing zero (and somehow have managed to forget that we had to learn that).