But that&#x27;s the point, once you think of indexes as distance things make much more sense.<p>The index is the distance from the first element. Thus, the third element is two elements away from the first, thus it has index 2.<p>I think the only reason zero-based indexing is not the standard everywhere is because some people (usually non-programmers) have a problem with the idea that the fifth element has index four.<p>I am suggesting that this is a linguistic problem that has messed up programming.