Off by one solitude

I've seen a lot of rulers that actually don't have a mark at 0 and instead go right to the edge as 0. Typically they are worn down, being made of wood, so the accuracy of the first inch is dubious. To ensure the distance is correct, sliding the ruler down one unit is a good idea. So, my ruler starts at 0 but my measurements start at 1.

Your job is to move apples from one bin to another. You pick up the first one and set it in the other bin, and say "zero."?

Touchè

i wish the people making buildings around here knew that. some start at floor 3, others at 5. some start at 0. others at 2. every building has its own story. you need to understand the building before you can understand your position in it.

If the walkway goes inside the building, then yes. And the walkway usually leads directly to the second floor, because the airplane door is 3 metres above the ground.

And R!

Englist*

i wonder why people haven’t made a language that starts indexing at 2 yet. maybe some day

I kind of brought this up in another comment, that "first" and "1st" aren't really the same thing. Which is confusing when you extend that to fourth/4th five/5th. I don't generally see someone write "zeroith", but I'll see "0th".

There's no such thing as "zeroith" because it's called "zeroth — being numbered zero in a series"

This works for building storeys, this would work equally well for tables. The only reason this is not used often is because the series are rarely zero-based in anything that doesn't also want to equate index and offset.

You're right that first may be read as "opposite of last", that would add to the confusion, but that's just natural language not being precise enough.

Edit: spelling

Edit2: also, if you extend that logic, when you're presented with an ordinal number, you would need to first check all the options, sort them, and then apply the position you're asked, that's not really how people would expect ordinal number to be treated, not me, at the very least

Ordinal vs. cardinal. It's "first" not "onest", right? Even the ancient proto-Germanic speakers could tell there's a difference. (In fact, it's basically a contraction of "foremost", and has nothing to do with numbers; their weak numeracy was an advantage on this topic)

If we weren't implicitly choosing 1-indexing it would be 1nd for "second" (and still not "onend" or something). That breaks down once you get to third and fourth, though.

That's because the word "first" in first() uses one-based indexing. In true programmer fashion it would have been called zeroth() but that is wholly unintuitive to most humans.

I maintain that the element with the lowest index is called the "zeroth" element in zero-based indexing and "first" in one-based indexing. The element with index N is the Nth element.

That's because you use English, a language where ordinals traditionally begin at one.