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by dnautics 1628 days ago
> If you're the only person who works in the rack, no problem.

It's still likely bad. Your brain is simply not wired to zero index physical objects.

1 comments

Which makes sense, as there can't be "negative" objects, mostly.

Building floors are more ambiguous - there can be basement, ie "negative" floors. So, floors in continental Europe are generally indexed 0-based (basements ..., -2, -1, ground floor = 0, upper floors 1, 2, ...). A German friend of mine caused some confusion when she checked into her student dorm at a US college, and having being told that her room was on the first floor, asked whether there was an elevator, as she had heavy suitcases.

In French, the first floor is called "Rez-de-chaussée" and the uppers are what called "Etage". So it's actually 1 based.
But the etage above the Rez-de-chaussée is 1, correct? The Rez-de-chaussée then is 0. That is 0-based indexing.

  US  D  F
   3  2  2
   2  1  1
 __1__0__RdC
  B1 -1  je ne sais pas
There is no Etage 0. People will just confusingly look at you if you ever said that. And the "Je ne sais pas' is called "Sous-sol"
In a lot of elevators rez-de-chaussée is labelled 0. We just don't use that when communicating
You can have multiple basement levels, which get numbered again. 1er Sousl-sol, 2eme Sous-sol etc. The ground floor might not be explicitly labeled as zero but the number between "one up" and "one down" is still zero.