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0 pointsjacknews2y ago0 comments

So the 'first' item in the list is actually the second?

The problem is you're trying to redefine English (and probably most other languages). The first item on a menu is, well the first item, like first place in a marathon, the first day of the month.

Surely a definition of the zeroth item would be something like an item that does not exist, the item that's left when you take away all the other items, etc.

Ordinals are 1-indexed. Language is 1-indexed; The #1 player is the best player, and so on.

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afiori2y ago

zeroth is the ordinal associated with the cardinal zero.

For example christmas is the zeroth day after christmas.

A common advice with regards to user inputs is that if you do not do ordering or arithmetic on a piece of data (eg a phone numbers) then it should be a string even if it is numeric.

Similarly n-indexed conventions should be considered in terms of practical pros and cons.

Linguistic similarity is not a convincing argument to me.

jacknewsOP2y ago

'associated'? Sounds nice, but not very convincing, except perhaps the zeroth item of an ordered set should be just that, 0.

I agree indexing is a trade-off, sometimes 0 is best, sometimes 1 makes more sense.

But it's not linguistic 'similarity'. You have to name things. If your names are off-by-one (the element named 'first' is actually the second) you're just sowing confusion.

afiori2y ago

sometime ordinals are more natural sometimes cardinals are more natural.

In the case of vectors (especially of C-style arrays) I would say that A[0] is the first element in the array. I agree that things should have names, but names serve us, not us them.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsjacknews2y ago0 comments

So the 'first' item in the list is actually the second?

The problem is you're trying to redefine English (and probably most other languages). The first item on a menu is, well the first item, like first place in a marathon, the first day of the month.

Surely a definition of the zeroth item would be something like an item that does not exist, the item that's left when you take away all the other items, etc.

Ordinals are 1-indexed. Language is 1-indexed; The #1 player is the best player, and so on.

0 comments

afiori2y ago

zeroth is the ordinal associated with the cardinal zero.

For example christmas is the zeroth day after christmas.

A common advice with regards to user inputs is that if you do not do ordering or arithmetic on a piece of data (eg a phone numbers) then it should be a string even if it is numeric.

Similarly n-indexed conventions should be considered in terms of practical pros and cons.

Linguistic similarity is not a convincing argument to me.

jacknewsOP2y ago

'associated'? Sounds nice, but not very convincing, except perhaps the zeroth item of an ordered set should be just that, 0.

I agree indexing is a trade-off, sometimes 0 is best, sometimes 1 makes more sense.

But it's not linguistic 'similarity'. You have to name things. If your names are off-by-one (the element named 'first' is actually the second) you're just sowing confusion.

afiori2y ago

sometime ordinals are more natural sometimes cardinals are more natural.

In the case of vectors (especially of C-style arrays) I would say that A[0] is the first element in the array. I agree that things should have names, but names serve us, not us them.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse