I like Mike Hoye's historical treatise of 0 vs 1 based indexing in [0.5]. A very interesting read in several ways. It subsumes:
[...] before pointers, structs, C and Unix existed, at a time when other languages with a lot of resources and (by the standard of the day) user populations behind them were one- or arbitrarily-indexed, somebody decided that the right thing was for arrays to start at zero.
[...] the technical reason we started counting arrays at zero is that in the mid-1960’s, you could shave a few cycles off of a program’s compilation time on an IBM 7094. The social reason is that we had to save every cycle we could, because if the job didn’t finish fast it might not finish at all and you never know when you’re getting bumped off the hardware because the President of IBM just called and fuck your thesis, it’s yacht-racing time.
Visual Basic had the "OPTION BASE" statement to select.[0] (Many other versions of basic did too)
APL also has the ⎕IO Index Origin setting [1]
If you want to see a lively debate, there's c2[2], and there's also Dijkstra[3]
[0] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa266179%28v=vs.60%...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_syntax_and_symbols
[2] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ZeroAndOneBasedIndexes
[3] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF