Why array indexes are zero based in most programming languages?

Question

C++, C#, C, D, Java,... are zero based.

Matlab is the only language I know that begin at 1.

Answer 1

Arrays are zero based in c and c++ as the represent the offset from the beginning of the list of the item.

These two lines have identical result in c.

anArray[3] = 4;
*(anArray +3) = 4; 

The first is the standard indexer the second takes the pointer adds three to id and then dereffrences it. Which is the same as the indexer.