Why do Lua arrays(tables) start at 1 instead of 0?

Question

I don\'t understand the rationale behind the decision of this part of Lua. Why does indexing start at 1? I have read (as many others did) this great paper. It seems to me a

Answer 1

In your example, table[0] will always return nil(null), unless you assign value to it yourself, like table[0] = 'some value' and then table[0] will return 'some value', which you assigned.

Here's an example:

tbl = {"some"}
print("tbl[0]=" .. tostring(tbl[0]))
print("tbl[1]=" .. tostring(tbl[1]))
nothing = {}
print("nothing[0]=" .. tostring(nothing[0]))
print("nothing[1]=" .. tostring(nothing[1]))
nothing[0] = "hey"
print("(after assign)\nnothing[0]=" .. tostring(nothing[0]))