There's a parallel idea, that you should avoid--insofar as is possible--numerical indexing. In other words, instead of iterating over `0:length(X) - 1` or `1:length(X)`, you use something like `for element in array` or
indices = CartesianIndices(multidimensional_X)
for index in indices
X[index] = # whatever
If you do that, you don't need to keep track of whether it's zero-based, one-based, or anything else. In fact, you may not even need to keep track of the number of dimensions, as in this example, https://julialang.org/blog/2016/02/iteration/
Works great for trivial cases where there's no interdependency between array elements. As soon as you need to access, for example, adjacent elements, you want to be able to just iterate over 1:length(X) - 1 and access a[i-1] and a[i]. This is the most direct way and thus easiest to get right. Abstractions only make it more error prone.
You can still do math on i, it avoids issues with OffsetArrays, and it might even be clearer why you're iterating. It requires that the array type support linear indexing, but so does doing anything sensible with X[i] and X[i-1].
I'm only skimming this post and I'm not familiar with Julia so maybe I'm missing it, but does it have a way to get an item AND its index? There's I think Enumrable? in Rust where it gives you a tuple with both the item and its index in cases where you need both.
Rust has the same problem with dealing with strings where if you don't realize how you are supposed to handle it with unicode you'll get burned when you don't correctly access code points.
Edit: Also thank you for the answer. I have been curious about Julia even though I'm not a data science/ML type, but never find time. I do like to keep an eye on it though.
I haven’t used Rust, but Julia keeps you from getting burned too badly by giving you an informative error message if you try to index "inside" a character:
julia> "François"[6]
ERROR: StringIndexError: invalid index [6], valid nearby indices [5]=>'ç' [7]=>'o'
I’m not a data science type either. I came to Julia through physics and general computing. It’s the best language for science I’ve ever encountered.
