Negative array indices

[Tyler Close]

A while back, Ping and Mark were considering accepting negative array
indices as counting from the back of the array rather than the front.

I would like register a protest. I think this cuts down on your ability to
catch programming errors. Also, people often use -1 as a "not found" return
value when searching an array for a value. Witness the code snippet I
grabbed from one of Mark's posts:

>The code is:
>
>    static public String aan(String rec) {
>        if (rec.length() >= 1 && "aeiou".indexOf(rec.charAt(0)) != -1) {
>            return "an " + rec;
>        } else {
>            return "a " + rec;
>        }
>    }

ciao,
Tyler