I'm an Electrical Engineer and I strongly disagree with your point of view of an engineer having problems understanding 0 based arrays…
When an Engineer is not a programmer you have to get him trained on programming techniques, and not the other way around.
0 based arrays have a strong logic; it definitely pays off understanding/using that logic.
From: steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: LUA oddities..
To: "Lua mailing list" <lua-l@lists.lua.org>
Date: Monday, June 18, 2012, 2:29 AM
On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 11:21 AM, Patrick Masotta <masottaus@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 3) Why there’s not a switch statement?
The answer to these questions is basically "Lua is not C, and it is
_definitely_ not Python"
It was originally designed to interface to engineers who were more
familiar with Fortran. These days, many engineers I come across are
more used to VBS (_so_ much gets done in Excel) and they have
difficulty reading zero-based arrays and curly braces. They may not
be programming experts, but they are certainly not kids - just come
from a different background.
There are Lua-derivatives that use the traditional curly braces, e.g.
Squirrel.
steve d.
PS it's Lua, not LUA: it is a word meaniing 'Moon', not an acronym.