Jonathan M Davis:
I would argue that the mistake is that iota(5) works. That's not at all clear,
Clarity is not an absolute property, it's also correlated to the frequency of usage and commonality. A symbol like a cross "+" doesn't have much of intrinsic meaning, but most people know what it means from their study of mathematics.
Unlike the "+" symbol the word "range" has some meaning, suggests an interval or range. range() is used all the time in Python, almost in every loop, it's extremely common, so all Python programmers learn the usage of range() (newbies need a bit of time to learn the meaning of the optional third argument, but as far as I know they don't stumble on range(5) once they know all things in Python start from zero unless told differently).
In my code iota() is common, even if it's surely not as common as range() in Python. I think it's common enough that you remember that iota(5) is a range of five items. And D too is 0-based. (and iota in APL accepted one argument).
Bye, bearophile
