I'm going to step out on a limb here and suggest something different than an integer 'keyed' array.

I think your coworker is getting at creating a one to one mapping of a 'set' in the physical world where we always start counting at 1. I can understand this, when you are not doing anything fancy, it is easy to understand some code when you are mapped 1 to 1 between software and the physical world.

My suggestion

Don't use integer based arrays for whatever you are storing, but use some other kind of dictionary or key value pair. These map better to real life as you aren't bound by an arbitrary integer. This has its place and I would recommend using it as much as you can due to the benifits of mapping concepts 1 to 1 between software and the physical world.

i.e. kvp['Name Server'] = "ns1.example.com"; (This is just one out of a million possible examples).

Discaimer

This most definitely not work when you are working with concepts based in mathmatics, basically because math is closer to the actual implementation of a computer. Using kvp sets are not going to help anything here, but will actually mess things up and make it more problematic. I haven't thought through all the corner cases where something may work better as kvp or as an array.

The end idea is to use the zero-based arrays or key value pairs where it makes sense, remember that when you only have a hammer, every problem starts looking like a nail...