ok, new rule:

anyone who thinks python's "passing a negative index into an array gives you an item from the end of the array" system makes sense is allowed to complain about lua indexing arrays from 1

@andrewt does it help knowing that lua doesn't have arrays and you can index tables with whatever you want, including the number 0?

@mavica_again I mean that would help if it was meaningfully true, but it's not really, it is?

Basically all modern programming languages have something that's equivalent to and array and something that's equivalent to Python's "dict", and the fact that in Lua both of those are "table" is of monumental irrelevance to anyone actually *using* Lua.

If I type "a = {1, 2, 3}" into Lua I get an array indexed from 1. If I type "#a" into Lua it tells me the number of consecutive numbers that are valid indices of "a", starting from 1. Lua has a built-in implementation of arrays that is supported directly by specialised syntax. And it indexes them from 1.

@andrewt well i wasn't trying to be too serious ​

personally, i think python's negative indexing (and slicing!) is extremely useful and i grok that lua's index-from-one stems more from historical reasons (and i prefer to be able to use #t rather than #t-1 to get to the last element of a list)