It does and doesn't. You can have any arbitrary index, but that changes the table from being an array to being both an array and a dictionary, some real weird Frankenstein stuff

> but that changes the table from being an array to being both an array and a dictionary

You're confusing the definition of the language with the implementation. In implementation you're right, most runtimes will treat arrays starting at 1 as a special case and optimize that access. The language itself doesn't make that distinction though. Here an array is simply any table indexed by integers. The documentation states it's thusly:

    You can start an array at index 0, 1, or any other value