One thing to keep in mind is that scientific computing languages often have people using them who are <i>not</i> programmers, and who will not be &quot;rolling their own multidimensional arrays.&quot;<p>If they&#x27;re used to R, MATLAB, or basically any statistics programming&#x2F;scripting language ever, not only will they be expecting 1-based indexing, they might not even know that that&#x27;s a thing they have to think about.