YES! this has some mathematical justification aside from "how the machine works"!

On another point, I just finished a 'C' project yesterday and I can barf out these C style for(;;) loops with code using [$i] indicies easily.

I think the BIG point here since we are talking about Perl, is who cares? A HUGE factor in Perl is that we don't care! Or for the most part! Consider: foreach my $thing(@array){..blah..} Normally for the most part, $array[0] vs $array[1] doesn't matter because it never comes up in the code. Perl also reduces the dreaded "off-by-one" error possibility.