[Someone]

That’s an ambiguity in English. “Foo is priority #1, bar priority #2, so foo has the higher priority” is perfectly valid English.

The only way to ‘solve’ that would be by banning priorities higher than 1, for example by numbering them 1, 0, -1,… or by using floats in the range (0,1] for priorities.

[ken]

I would say this is a problem with type systems. Programming languages (including SQL) mostly just have one type for “integers”, or possibly a few types for different numbers of bytes of storage.

“Priority” and “array index” and “number of cantaloupes” and “age on 1-Jan-2020” may all be represented by integers but they’re all very different types.

Hungarian tried to solve this, sort of, but it’s at the wrong level. It’s not going to know which ones of these sort in which direction.