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Frankly, I was entirely unconvinced by his interpretation of Martin Richards' comment. Richards plainly says
[...] Just as machine code allows address arithmetic so does BCPL, so if p is a pointer p+1 is a pointer to the next word after the one p points to. Naturally p+0 has the same value as p. [...] I can see no sensible reason why the first element of a BCPL array should have subscript one. He's talking about pointer arithmetic! Which is exactly what the author of the article is saying was NOT the reason to choose 0-indexing...? How does that even make sense?BCPL was essentially designed as typeless language close to machine code.