Why Python does *SLICING* the way it does??

[Roy Smith]

Antoon Pardon  <apardon at forel.vub.ac.be> wrote:
>Op 2005-04-20, Roy Smith schreef <roy at panix.com>:
>> Antoon Pardon <apardon at forel.vub.ac.be> wrote:
>>
>>> Personnaly I would like to have the choice. Sometimes I prefer to
>>> start at 0, sometimes at 1 and other times at -13 or +7.
>>
>> Argggh.  Having two (or more!) ways to do it, would mean that every time I 
>> read somebody else's code, I would have to figure out which flavor they are 
>> using before I could understand what their code meant.  That would be evil.
>
>This is nonsens. table[i] = j, just associates value j with key i.
>That is the same independend from whether the keys can start from
>0 or some other value. Do you also consider it more ways because
>the keys can end in different values?

There are certainly many examples where the specific value of the
first key makes no difference.  A good example would be

    for element in myList:
        print element

On the other hand, what output does

   myList = ["spam", "eggs", "bacon"]
   print myList[1]

produce?  In a language where some lists start with 0 and some start
with 1, I don't have enough information just by looking at the above
code.