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by thomnific
3472 days ago
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I agree with you and also with the person you replied to. But more generally -- is it fair to say that cardinality describes size as opposed to quantity? If you go with the quantity concept instead then 1-based numbering makes sense and agrees with ordinary usage. (Disclaimer: I used to hate 1-based indexing, for reasons similar to what you are saying, but I'm brainwashed by R these days and now rather like it.) |
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Nope, size is equivalent to quantity in this context. But ordinals describe position in an order as opposed to size/quantity. If you want to connect them mathematically, you would usually map a scale to a quantity measure, where the first unit position on the scale is the zero-position, the second unit position is the one-position, and so on--so, a quantity of size three units reaches from the position 0 on the scale to the position 3 on the scale.
> (Disclaimer: I used to hate 1-based indexing, for reasons similar to what you are saying, but I'm brainwashed by R these days and now rather like it.)
Well, it doesn't matter unless you have to to arithmetic with the indices, you might as well label them with letters from the alphabet, so if you don't need that, it's simply a matter of getting used to it. But in general-purpose programming languages, array indices are often computed, and 1-based indexing is as sensible there are having an integer type that doesn't have a zero. It's not that you cannot work with it, but it makes things unnecessarily complicated.