With half-open ranges, for example, you will need different code to address a segment and the last element of a segment. E.g. if you have some structure with start_of(i) and end_of(i) expressions, then you can do a[start_of(i):end_of(i)] with closed indexing and a[end_of(i)] to access the last element, while with open intervals, you have to break the abstraction and use a[end_of(i)-1].
You can also iterate over start_of(i) .. end_of(i) in a for loop naturally if ranges are closed. (See how Python's iteration is defined in terms of half-open ranges and how iterating over closed ranges – which happens often enough when the values aren't indices – is a bit of a pain in Python.)
