I don’t really care if @mhoye is 100% correct (or even 100% wrong) about this – telling people that “yacht-racing influenced zero-based indexing code optimization” makes a great story, and is a terrific teaching aid when introducing people to the idea of counting from zero. I wish I’d known this a couple of weeks ago. At the time I just hand-waved away zero-indexing by saying “just because programmers do things like that”. Yacht-racing would have made for a better lecture. Thanx for adding another anecdote to our mythology!