[hougaard]

It really comes down to a choice between a machine-focused (0) or human-focused (1) approach.

The 0 makes a lot of sense in a C pointer world where memcpy and other alike functions can be written very thight.

The 1 makes a lot of sense in a human world, when we count, we start at 1, we talk about the "1st", counting on finger starts with 1, etc.

I once were at a Lua (1 indexed language) conference where this was discussed, and Luis started explaining why Lua was 1-index with this sentence: "The 1st argument ...." :)

[numlock86]

> It really comes down to a choice between a machine-focused (0) or human-focused (1) approach.

Just think of 0-based as offset-based and 1-based as index-based. Both are intuitive just like that. I never get why people arguing over this bring pointers and memory (or anything computer related) to the table. No normal person is going to understand that, but everyone understands that if you don't move at all (0 offset) you stay at the first (index 1) item. Add one and ... you get the point.

[amalcon]

"Offset-based" is bringing in pointers; that's the thing it's an offset "from". "The beginning of the array" is just a pointer.

I suppose saying that does have an advantage over explicitly talking about pointers, in that the word "pointer" is a piece of jargon that has a lot of baggage. That's just avoiding jargon, though, not really using a different model.

[samatman]

No, offset means "measuring from origin", pointers use that language they don't provide it.

The advantages in measuring from origin can accrue to the person choosing to do it, because there are other reasons to do so which aren't satisfying the CPU.

[amalcon]

No, offset means "measuring from a defined location". In a computer, the choice of location is more or less arbitrary[0]. If you pick the first element, you get zero indexing. If you pick a space before the first element, you get one indexing. Either one is a pointer, since a pointer is just computer jargon for "a defined location".

Calling that defined location "origin" doesn't suddenly make it not a pointer.

[0]- NUMA and cache effects aside, as they don't matter for this purpose

[kazinator]

Offset-based lets you refer to an abstract location that is after the last element without resorting to n + 1.

  [ ] [ ] [ ] ...    [ ]
 0   1   2   3   n-1     n

We can regard this n as a "virtual zero", and then make it possible to index the n - 1 element also indexable as just -1. The index -n then aliases to 0.

[kccqzy]

I must say in this case Google does it right: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/reference/standard-sql...

In Google standard SQL, to access an array it is simply not allowed to put a number inside square brackets. You must specify which way you mean. So `SELECT some_numbers[OFFSET(1)], some_numbers[ORDINAL(1)]` is allowed but not `SELECT some_numbers[1]`.

[kergonath]

That sounds actually great to avoid any ambiguity. At the cost of a bit of verbosity, though.

[chii]

that's actually good verbosity, because the intent is very clear using this method, and multiple people can read the code and unambiguously identify the intent without having to talk to the original author.

This type of verbosity makes sense in a big organization where the left hand doesn't talk much to the right hand much, so communication naturally evolves to happen at the code level.

[kergonath]

Indeed.

I like for example using enum types to ensure that what’s actually passed is the expected value even though fundamentally the semantics do not need to be much more complicated than integer values. There could be the same thing with a distinction between offset and indices as two different integer numerical types to avoid any ambiguity.

[dllthomas]

But I think that still leaves open the question of "offset from what?"

If you move zero from the first element, you're still at the first element... but if you move zero from the fourth element you're still at the fourth element. If you move one from before the first element, you're at the first element.

I think you're more or less right, but I think we still need something to motivate the first element as the point of reference, and the machine focus is one way to do that.

[lupire]

In some languages/environments, the array is literally the same as the pointer to the first element.

Other languages are more sophisticated (like humans are!) and can say that position 0 does not exist. An array of size 0 has no elements. An array of size 5 has elements 1at through 5th. An array of size N has 1st through Nth, inclusive.

[lupire]

"ordinal" is preferred to "index", as "index" doesn't naturally suggest starting at "1", or even restricting the key to integers. "Ordinal" starts from 1, everyone agrees (except mathematicians, of course :-) ).

[pb7]

Ask 100 random people on the street and I'd be surprised if even 1 knew the definition of "ordinal". It's an uncommon word.

[LudwigNagasena]

Do people not study grammar in American schools? I thought all kids learn the distinction between cardinal (one, two, three) and ordinal (first, second, third) numbers.

[pb7]

At the age that cardinal and ordinal numbers are taught, kids simply don't remember "cardinal" and "ordinal", they remember "one, two, three" and "first, second, third".

99% of the instances I've seen "ordinal" outside of this thread has been in code/documentation. It is not a common word in everyday language.

[Octoth0rpe]

The English grammar that Americans study in school is likely somewhat different than the English grammar that is taught outside of America as the goal of the latter is likely focused on helping students map their native language onto English. I would agree that `ordinal` is uncommon word for many Americans, but it wouldn't at all surprise me if there were languages where the equivalent word was far more common, and therefore its use and translation was a part of standard English as a second language curriculum.

[Morgawr]

> The English grammar that Americans study in school is likely somewhat different than the English grammar that is taught outside of America as the goal of the latter is likely focused on helping students map their native language onto English

English is spoken as a native language in many countries outside of America.

[lupire]

So is "array". What's your point? My point is that it is unambiguous once you say what you are talking about.

[pb7]

I disagree. The CS definition of array, sure, but if you were to say “we have an array of options to eat”, most people with a high school education would know what you mean.

[Joker_vD]

And then the counting niceties come along: those perennial +1 mistakes are caused by the fact that, e.g. 4 and 5 are two numbers but they are only one apart.

[randomdata]

> when we count, we start at 1, we talk about the "1st"

Although often with an implicit zero. Under typical North American culture, your 1st birthday, for example, is more accurately the first anniversary of your birthday. Your birth is zero indexed.

[ethbr0]

It's fundamentally a distinction between end-index and start-index.

Most human counting uses end-index. I.e. "1" is after 1-thing (has passed, is physically obtained, etc.).

Most computer counting uses start-index + length, for efficiency and to better generalize. I.e. "1" is at the memory address immediately before the "1"st item.

Which ultimately creates the "0 index is 1st thing" linguistic confusion.

PS: Also, language predates computers by a few years, and the concept of zero is hard.

[smegsicle]

good take!

i think a more accurate and complete idea is that humans refer to a thing in its entirety, with things being lined up and scanned in order as only a potential convenience

if you ask someone to identify an object, they'll point to the middle (or center of the most important component) of the object, not to the 'start' or 'end' of it in their field of vision..

that said, the human perspective is subtle and convenient in completely different ways to how a computer manages memory, and this 'end-index' idea seems like a useful way to map the human whole-object perspective to a linear memory-index perspective

[ethbr0]

They may point to the middle, but that's not a reference to half an object. ;)

The assumption is that the thing is its entirety, as you said.

Hypothetically, I imagine an array index reference, in human terms, would be communicated as "this thing starts here" or "this is the beginning of this thing."

Which isn't a concept or phrasing we have much occasion to use, other than for routes or long length-measured objects?

[Tagbert]

Birthdays are anniversaries. Anniversaries are annual activities when we celebrate/honor past events. They do not include the event itself. The first anniversary is 1 year after the initial event.

[sokoloff]

Yes, that’s the explanation for how we count them as we do, but it has no greater weight (and I’d argue less weight) as to why than saying whether a[0] or a[1] should be the first element in an array.

I say it has less weight as birthday is a compound word, the root words of which suggest that your first birthday could logically be the day of your birth rather than a year after it.

My first weddingday was not a year after I got married. My first graduationday was not a year after I graduated.

[randomdata]

> Birthdays are anniversaries.

Indeed they are, which is why I literally said so in the previous comment. Did you forget to finish reading it?

> They do not include the event itself.

That is true because the event itself is implied information. There is no value in speaking of it. If you stand before us, we can be certain that you had a day of birth (your 0th anniversary). We don't necessarily know how many times you've gone around the sun following that, however, so that is where we find value in communicating additional information.

If you were counting apples, there is the state where you have no apples (index 0), the state where you have one apple (index 1), the state where you have two apples (index 2), etc. When counting you don't need to worry about index 0 because the no apple state is naturally implied. It only becomes interesting and worthy of communication when you have at least one apple to speak of, thus you start at 1. The state found at index 0 is still implicitly there, though.

[lupire]

If I care about apples (for my lunch, or my store), I care about the difference between having 0 of them and not having bothered to count yet.

0!=null

[randomdata]

If no apples is the unusual state, like you expected to find an apple in your lunchbox but someone ate it without your knowledge, then certainly there would be reason to communicate the no apples state. It is ignored in communication when it does not provide useful information, but it is not forgotten. The 0th index is implicitly there.

[anigbrowl]

Come to the infinity store - we literally sell everything! (some items may be out of stock)

[samatman]

Ok then everyone must do it like us, right?

There's no culture where you're born at 1 year old and turn 2 on New Years when everyone gets older?

You sure?

[hougaard]

Yeah age is confusing even for non-computer-folks :)

If you have 4 classes in school today, you would never talk about the 1st class as number 0, the last one is the 4th, not the 3rd.

[randomdata]

Although, there is a fifth state in your example: When you are not in class. Which is different to an empty set that implies nothingness. When it comes to age, 0 being birth works well because there is truly is nothingness (from your perspective) before birth. When counting from 1 there is suggestion that there are variables that aren't worth speaking of because they are obvious.

[goatlover]

Assuming there is nothingness for the fetus the entire nine months in the womb. For that matter, I can't recall being younger than four, so it's all nothingness before then.

[randomdata]

Not really. Perspective isn't scientific and often cultural. Koreans, for example, famously have a different take and use a different counting systems to accommodate.

I am assuming that the reader is biased towards the average HN user. That won't always work for everyone who will come across my comment, but close enough for an unpaid contribution. I'm not about to write a novel to make sure I catch every edge case.

[yongjik]

That's why I prefer the Superior(TM) Korean age counting. You are one year old when you're born (it's your first year!). You are two year old on the next New Year's day. (Congratulations, it's your second your now!)

So, if you're born on December 31st, you're two years old the next day. (I see no problem, but apparently some people are hung up on such minor details. I can't fathom why.)

[tromp]

> You are one year old when you're born (it's your first year!)

That makes no sense to me. It's also your first century. Does that make you one century old? Of course not! The moment you're born, you're not even one hour old, let alone one day.

[BuckRogers]

They must like rounding up. I guess it depends how they refer to it in their language. If it's "he's in his 1st year", that's a big difference from, "he's 1 year old". I'm wondering if the parent comment simply doesn't know Korean or only knows it somewhat to misconstrue the culture behind this.

It could be though that Korea simply never encountered the Mayan or Arabic civilizations as most did encounter one of those two in history, who are famously known to have independently discovered the concept of zero.

Birth of an array can only logically be defined as index zero, the same as a child. The concept of zero was not universal globally and Korea is pretty isolated.

[OscarCunningham]

Except that we actually do use this system for years. Thus 1 BC (the first year BC) was followed by 1 AD (the first year AD). Also for centuries, as in 'the 20th century' being the years 1901 to 2000.

[hathawsh]

A more sensible English translation from Korean would be to use the phrase "in year X" rather than the phrase "X years old": a newborn is in year 1; after 12 months they are in year 2; etc.

In fact, this whole discussion is more about a choice of phrasing rather than the numbers. When indexing arrays, sometimes we're talking about an offset from the first element (starting with "0"), and sometimes we're talking about ordinal element numbers (starting with "first"). Some programming language designers found that offsets are more useful (because that choice tends to simplify the underlying arithmetic), while others found that ordinal numbers are more useful (because the word "first" should mean "1", to simplify communication between people).

[OscarCunningham]

Right. I try to refer to a[n] as 'element number n' rather than 'the nth element'.

[BeFlatXIII]

> I see no problem, but apparently some people are hung up on such minor details. I can't fathom why.

Americans and their alcohol laws…

[gumby]

This system is used for racehorses as well.

[dllthomas]

There's nothing wrong with the definition per se, but there's the question of what purpose you're putting it to. We should expect more similarity from two "newly 2" children with the "western" system than the Korean one.

[galangalalgol]

Doesn't Korea use the same new year as China? Usually second new moon after winter solstice.

[smegsicle]

hung up on minor details!

[Stratoscope]

Rulers too. A ruler starts at 0, not 1.

[dividuum]

Not all of them do: https://twitter.com/blinry/status/1550920690529968128 %)

[Stratoscope]

Nice! I want a Lua ruler now.

[anigbrowl]

That's because it's dimensional. How long is the shortest possible ruler?

[dalmo3]

1 planck length, and... It starts - and ends - at 1?

[anigbrowl]

No. Your age is 1-indexed. It's a 'birthday' in English and German ('geburstag'); in French it's 'anniversaire', and so on. But pretty much everyone indexes age from 1. The fact of your birth is the transition from (legal) non-existence to existence, the equivalent of a dimensionless point.

[wruza]

Age is definitely 0-indexed - a newborn and exactly 1 year old differ by a year. People also count months during the first year, which is still 0 years old. As in 00:xx is the first hour, and 01:xx is the second. If you're 30 years old, it's your 31st year of life now.

But gregorian epoch itself is 1-based. 1AD (0001-01-01) goes right after 1BC (-0001-12-31). There was no 0000-mm-dd. That's why 3rd "millenium" and 21st century started at 2001-01-01 and not at 2000-01-01. YYYY means not how many whole years already passed, but which incomplete year goes right now. On the other hand, your age means "whole years passed since birth [plus maybe a few months]".

[bmacho]

Age is not indexed.

And the birthdays are definitely 1 indexed: you denote your first birthday with 1, and not with 0, and so on. You don't denote any birthdays of yours with 0. You may denote something else with it, but birthdays[0] gives an out of range exception. (Especially true in French, where birthdays are called anniversaire, but in English too.)

[drewzero1]

Oddly(?) though, most parents of young children don't refer to a baby as being "zero years old." Rather, we break them down into smaller units: two days old, six weeks old, four months old.

[throwaway821909]

It helps that change happens particularly fast at that age, so the difference between newborn and 6 months is worth mentioning. Later on the units go up again and we just say "I'm in my 30s" :P

On the other hand a computer/car/house can also be 10 years old but not 0.

[samatman]

Duration only ever departs from 0, it can never arrive there.

That's why zero-based indexing is good!

[drewzero1]

True, a few weeks can mean a few milestones at that age. It's still wild to me how quickly babies/kids develop. Every week brings new abilities, experiences, and emotions that weren't there before.

[wruza]

On the other hand a computer/car/house can also be 10 years old but not 0

Really? When I buy a new PC, to me it will get 1 year old only after a year. Before that it is just NEW. Is that what you meant?

[pvinis]

Exactly. What we call "new" is the 0th year. It's the same when you start counting seconds. You say "ok counting starts now", then wait a second and say "one", then wait and say "two". Before you say "one", you don't say zero, but it's implied by you waiting a second after you or someone says "go". That's still 0-indexed.

[ellen364]

Demographers sometimes describe age as “the number of completed years”, which always struck me as a wonderfully simple explanation.

[lupire]

The first floor in a USA building is not where a European would expect.

[atwood22]

No, birthdays are 1 indexed. Your Nth birthday is the day you turn N years old. When you're 1 year old, you've been alive for 1 year, not 2 years.

[randomdata]

The moment you are born you are 0 years old (or perhaps 0.75 years old, but we don't usually recognize that). We count from zero in this case, at least implicitly.

In some cultures you are considered 1 the moment you are born, so the zero indexing isn't universal here, but typical in North America as noted earlier.

[themacks]

Typical counting of things starts from 0. If you count apples you implicitly start at zero and add 1 for each apple. If you count age, you start at birth (0) and count years; one for each birthday. That isn't zero based. The difference is the index of the item between the starting point and the next item. In zero based this item is number 0, in one based, this item is number 1. The first year of life is generally considered the year following birth.

[samatman]

This is a philosophically deep point which took me a long time to grasp.

There is a narrowing from "nothing at all" to "zero apples" which doesn't happen 'in the world' but is a necessary precondition to counting apples. The existence of any apple is a requirement for there to be zero of them before you put anything in the basket.

[dylan604]

>If you count age, you start at birth (0) and count years; one for each birthday.

nitpick: unless you were born on Feb 29.

[somat]

I just dealt with this problem(how to store periodic events(including birthdays)). It is a surprisingly difficult problem. After reading up on postgres interval types my latest attempt uses them to store events, where a per year event(like a birthday) is stored as "2 months 15 days". it turns out the postgres project has put quite a bit of thought into making interval types work as expected with regards to months, not an easy task when you consider how difficult it is to treat dates mathematically.

The nice part is that now February 29 "just works" the downside is the impedance between how months and days are numbered and a how an offset from the epoch(beginning of the year) is defined. January 3rd(1-3) is stored as "0 months 2 days" as when it hits, 0 months have passed and 2 days have passed.

So the specific case of February 29 hits when 1 month has passed and 28 days have passed. 3 years out of 4 this will be the same as "2 months 0 days"(3-1) but every forth year this will be(2-28). As an aside, and the specific reason I went with interval types, every event past feburary 29 works just fine with or without a leapyear, that is, the extra day in the middle does not mess up the offset to days after it.

Honestly I curse a little as I wish months and days were 0-based. At least clocks get this right, almost, 12 hour clocks are a special breed of stupid. start at 12, then go to 1 and proceed up to 11. 24 hour clocks properly start at 0. The worst part about 12 hour clocks is that it is almost correct, replace the 12 with a 0 and it every thing be the same but now it makes sense from a moduler math point of view.

A special curse is reserved when I think about how there is no year zero. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/functions-datetime.html#F...

[copperx]

I didn't know that. Do you get to be 1 year old if you are born on Feb 29, to account for leap years?

[goatlover]

> If you count apples you implicitly start at zero and add 1 for each apple.

If that's the case, then how did the ancient Greeks or Romans count before zero was an acceptable concept in their counting system?

[unbalancedevh]

By describing it in other ways, I imagine: "How many apples do you have?" "I don't have any."

[atwood22]

No, we don't count from 0. That's like saying we start counting a baker's cup from 0 because you can have half a cup.

[kazinator]

The counting activity doesn't begin when the first item is registered; it begins when the counter is initialized to zero. A decision is made to begin counting, along with the realization that nothing has been counting yet. That's when counting has started. When the first item is seen, the counting is then continuing.

Suppose your job is to count some events. You check in for work at 8:00 a.m., but the first event has not registered until noon. By your logic you should not be paid for four hours, because you're paid to count, and counting started at 1.

[lupire]

Are you sure?

We are talking about the he numbering, not the work-doing.

You start waiting at 8, and you wait between events. But you only count (increment) when an event happens.

The 0 comes for free when you are ready to count (hello golang and C++, as well as human intuition).

When you count stars in the sky you don't say "0, 1, 2".

You say "..., 1, 2", or if no stars show up, you say "there are 0" after timer expires.

[anigbrowl]

You're still thinking like a computer. Most people think of counting in terms of 'here are some apples, how many exactly?'

If you just look at an empty space, the # of apples is equivalent is equivalent to the # of dinosaurs, but they're only equivalent by their absence.

[atwood22]

No, the mathematical definition of counting (i.e. whether or not a set is countable) involves mapping to the natural numbers, which doesn’t include 0.

[goatlover]

What counter? You're saying a counter exists before people start counting? Is this a form of mathematical Platonism?

[kazinator]

What do you do for a living, and why are they paying you not to understand this?

[atwood22]

Do you know the definition of countable? A set S is countable if there is a one-to-one mapping from S to N where N is the natural numbers. Do you know that 0 is not a member of the natural numbers? We literally start counting at 1 by definition of countable.

[bmacho]

Can't they just .. disagree?

Birthdays are clearly 1 indexed, the first birthday is indexed with 1, and not with 0.

[emaginniss]

Ok, use the baker and cup as an example. If you have an empty cup and put half of a cup of flour in it, you now have 0.5 cups of flour. Notice the zero before the ".5". That is us, normal humans, realizing that until you add enough to have 1 of something, you have between 0 and 0.999 repeating.

[bregma]

When I'm baking I start by zeroing the scale, then adding enough flour to reach 500 g (or whatever the recipe calls for). That's counting from zero.

[randomdata]

If we (speaking as a North American) count from 1, does that mean other cultures (e.g. Korean) count from 2?

[atwood22]

No, it just means we have a different notion of what a year is in regards to age. Similar to how different cultures can use different units of measurement for length, mass, etc.

[8note]

I start with a empty cup, then I fill it up to 1 cup.

I then put it in an initially empty bowl

[samatman]

Yes this is correct!

The milliliters in a baker's cup are a scale based on 0!

[rcoveson]

No, old calendar systems are one indexed. In those system, there is literally no year zero; the first year is year one. This leads to crazy things like year 100 being part of the "first century" and year 101 being part of the "second century".

That is not the case with age or birthdays which are, thankfully, zero indexed. The first year of human life is age=0, birthdays=0.

[samatman]

So that we don't create more falsehoods programmers believe about dates, ISO has defined decades and centuries as starting with 0, not 1.

So as far as your job is concerned, that's when they start. Hope that helps.

[lupire]

It's not "crazy". No one care about which century X00 is. The term "century" doesn't have enough sig figs. X00 is "the turn of the century".

[rcoveson]

If you don't care then sure, it's not crazy, but if you did care then believe me, it is crazy. Crazy enough that astronomers[0] and software engineers[1] rebelled against the historian's practice and renamed the years preceding 1 AD in the proleptic gregorian calendar year 0, year -1, year -2, et cetera. A major benefit of this is it allows the leap year pattern to stay consistent and the rule to remain legibile for all years, going back before 1 AD. It's also nice because it lets us say "the 90's were the last ten years of the 20th century" and be correct.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_year_numbering

1. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/time/temporal...

[csours]

Your birth day is the day you are born.

Your first birthday is the first anniversary of your birth day.

We celebrate the anniversaries of our birth day.

[treis]

Yep, clearer in Spanish. They say cumpleaños which literally means completed year.

[wruza]

Haha, this thing is messed up. Your "first birthday" is technically second, because the first was at your, well, day of birth. But we people love to complicate things and count 1st birthday as a number of annual celebration events after the first mm-dd of birth. Off by one as it is.

[brianzelip]

So how old is a not-yet-1-year old?

[nomel]

Elapsed time timers start at 0. Time is continuous. The elapsed time being “out of the womb”, that we call “age”, starts near 0. Five minutes after birth, the baby has been in the world for, or it’s age is, five minutes. If someone asked how old a new baby is you could hear “3 weeks”.

Another definition might be from conception. But birth being “one year old” is illogical. The sperm didn’t even exist yet, one year before birth.

[xxs]

Your mistake is using years - use milliseconds (or nanoseconds) when you wish to express a duration. Years don't even have the same duration/length (leap years, and leap seconds)

[atwood22]

N days or N months depending on how old the baby is.

[rcoveson]

And before an hour has even passed, we'd probably say "minutes old" or perhaps "not even an hour/day old", all to avoid saying "zero days/months/years old". But some might still say zero days old, and they'd be both understood and correct (at least logically if not stylistically). That's the "implicit zero" everybody is talking about. We avoid saying it, but that's just a convention of communcation. Logically it's there. You're zero days old before you're one day old.

[randomdata]

And it turns out that 0 days, 0 months is 0 years.

[Aardwolf]

> human-focused (1) approach.

TBH humans would have been better of if we were 0-based, it's just a convention. And we have the confusing language where "20th century" means 1900's. If we wanted to bring the 1-indexing we use in language to the fullest extent here to fix that particular issue, time counting would have to start at 1111. Except that won't work once reaching 5-digit years.

If we would start with "zeroeth" instead of "1st", then this would have solved itself and 20th century would mean 20xx's.

I especially don't understand why mathematicians use 1-based indexing (for matrix rows/columns etc...). Like programmers, they should see the advantages of starting at 0 (e.g. the coordinates of subdividing into block matrices are simpler if starting at 0). Mathematicians do start at 0 for the origin of plots, after all.

[OscarCunningham]

> If we wanted to bring the 1-indexing we use in language to the fullest extent here to fix that particular issue, time counting would have to start at 1111.

That's funny, but there's actually an elegant way to do it called Bijective numeration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijective_numeration). We're currently living in the 1A22th year.

[zajio1am]

> The 1 makes a lot of sense in a human world, when we count, we start at 1, we talk about the "1st", counting on finger starts with 1, etc.

It is more like counting from 1 is just a leftover from times where zero was not commonly considered as number. Once one have zero, it makes sense to use it as an initial ordinal (see e.g. set theory, where zero is both initial ordinal and initial cardinal number, way before computers).

Another example is time and date, we start counting of days from 1, but counting of hours (at least in 24-hour notation) and minutes from 0.

> Luis started explaining why Lua was 1-index with this sentence: "The 1st argument ...."

Note that for spoken language, it is "The first argument ..." and 'first' is etymologically unrelated to 'one', but related to 'foremost', 'front', so it make sense to use 'first' for the initial item in the sequence even when using counting from 0.

[steadicat]

When talking about discrete things, 0 has a specific meaning: it is the absence of things. It does not make sense to count the 'first' element as the 0th. When you encounter the 'first' element, how many elements do you have? 1.

This is of course different for continuous quantities. When counting seconds, for example, we should absolutely start from 0.

[kazinator]

In Western music theory, intervals are one based. No pitch change is "unison"; one diatonic step is a "major second" and so on. As a result of this silly state of affairs, an octave occurs every 7 notes, even though the root "oct" means eight. Furthermore, a "rule of nines" is needed to invert an interval: e.g. inversion of minor 3rd is a major 6th (exchange major/minor, subtract from 9).

[OscarCunningham]

And addition also gets broken. Like a third plus a fourth is a sixth.

[oh_my_goodness]

True, and it's a great example of how this whole drama is about a practical trade-off, not about a unique Right Answer. If you play piano, the second is the second finger; the fifth is the fifth finger, and it all makes sense. No problem. On the other hand trying to actually count that way (two thirds make a fifth and so forth) is maddening.

[qu4z-2]

Clearly the solution is we need to start numbering fingers from 0.

[kazinator]

No, just use subtraction for the intervals. Third finger minus first finger = 3 - 1 = 2.

The floors of a building might start at 1, but you go up 1 flight of stairs from the 5th to the 6th floor, not two.

[oh_my_goodness]

Maybe that would do it. The only problem is that I'd have four fingers on each hand.

[qsort]

I don't think 1-based arrays are better notation, even completely ignoring that code has to run on a machine.

99% of the times, the correct approach is to use iterators. When you really need indices (and you almost never do), 0 is more practical, because it matches the "including start, not including end" convention.

[kazinator]

> when we count, we start at 1

That is false; counting begins by initializing an accumulator to zero. When you register the first item, the count jumps from 0 to 1.

[goatlover]

Who sets an accumulator to zero and then adds one in everyday language?

[kazinator]

For instance, someone who makes a fist with zero extended fingers before counting.

Or someone who simply becomes motivated to count something, without making any utterances or gestures to that effect. The motivation is followed by the persistent awareness that nothing has been counted yet, which then changes to 1.

[pvinis]

Not saying "zero" doesn't mean we don't mean it. All counting starts with 0. We just say "one" out loud as the first number. We probably should say "zero" too, but why say a word when you can say no words?

[goatlover]

Or we just start counting with 1, since 1 is the first number we start with. Do small kids start with a concept of zero and then adding one to it, or do they just start at one?

[kazinator]

If you start at 1, how do you answer the question "how many apples are in the basket", when the basket is empty?

Or do you believe that the answer "none" or "zero" is then given without the activity of counting having taken place?

What do we call the meta-activity then: the procedure that results either in the "empty" answer or "one", "two"? Whatever that activity is called, it starts with a concept of zero. Let's call that activity "quanting". Quanting starts with a motivation to enumerate items, and an initially empty result. When no items are present, quanting terminates, reporting that zero/nothing/none result. Otherwise quanting branches into a subprocedure called counting, and that begins at 1.

[goatlover]

Humans could do basic counting prior to the concept of zero. Obviously kids or anyone prior to zero would say there are no apples in the basket, but if you were to ask an ancient Greek philosopher if that meant "no apples" is something worthy of being denoted, they might think you're doing sophistry and trying to elevate nothing to something.

A smart ass kid might reply there are zero oranges in the basket, or zero miniature unicorns. Since the basket is empty, it could have potentially had anything if we're just going to imagine things in baskets. But we don't enumerate over all possible zero items in the basket. And anyway, the basket isn't really empty since it has N air molecules, N fibers or whatever.

The pedantic point I'm making is that counting at zero is a convention we developed for mathematical reasoning when appropriate, but not a starting place for counting things in everyday language.

[tromp]

> when we count, we start at 1

If I ask you to count the number of red balls in a bag with only 3 yellow balls, then the initial count in your head is 0, you inspect the balls one by one, never encountering a red ball, and thus never incrementing the count. And then you pronounce your final count of 0. So that's counting starting from 0.

What you call "starting at 1" is not so much the start as it is the first increment, which need not arise.

[Aardwolf]

> human-focused (1) approach.

TBH humans would have been better of if we were 0-based, it's just a convention. And we have the confusing language where "20th century" means 1900's. If we wanted to bring the 1-indexing we use in language to the fullest extent here to fix that particular issue, time counting would have to start at 1111. Except that won't work once reaching 5-digit years.

If we would start with "zeroeth" instead of "1st", then this would have solved itself and 20th century would mean 20xx's.

[airstrike]

> where "20th century" means 1900's

to this day I can't seem to be able to explain to people that Jan 1 2000 was NOT the start of the new millennium, but rather Jan 1 2001

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-26-mn-4810-...

[xxs]

I have used 1 based in basic/pascal and 0 based (well in pretty much everything), 0 based effectively no off-by one mistakes. 1 based - common. Most idioms - incl. forward and reverse iterations work better, and are easier to remember with inclusive/exclusive pattern

Other than that - binary AND and power of 2 sized arrays are the backbone of any hashtable. Overall modulus (binary AND) is actually useful.

[kevin_thibedeau]

It has nothing to do with pointers and everything to do with basic computer arithmetic. You can constrain the range of an integer with a bitwise AND operation providing a cheap modulus by power of two. In this regime, zero-based indexing is the natural result. You have to make an adjustment for 1-based. There are whole host of other operations that are simpler with 0-based indexing.

The problem it that most people, even programmers, don't understand how computer arithmetic works and have fantasies of mathematical number lines that the hardware only partially simulates. You see this consistently in the post-Java crowd who think that unsigned integers are some sort of unholy aberration because the languages they've grown up went further to maintain the fictional number line semantics.

[co_dh]

Human makes a lot of inconsistent thing: We usually think the 1st floor, and the basement as 1st underground floor ( -1), but the floor jumps from 1 to -1!

Also, the time jump from 11AM to 12PM to 1PM! So I think more human friendly sometimes means more confusing.

[BorisTheBrave]

In Europe, the floor level with the ground is called "ground" or "0".

[luispauloml]

That's true. But as for floor numbering, specifically, it depends on the country: some places have a "ground floor" between the 1st underground floor and the 1st "above ground" floor.

[copperx]

It's like English pronunciation, there's little logic. I gave up finding logic in these things at an early age, and resorted to memorizing everything instead.

[kazinator]

Is it machine-focused that we can convert a distance of 1.5 m to 150 cm just by multiplying by 100?

Maybe distances should be human-focused, so that no displacement is equivalently expressed as 1 cm, 1 m, 1 km, ...

Then converting a distance d from m to cm is (d - 1) x 100 + 1.

[hougaard]

... but if you have something that's 150cm, that's not 151cm, that's 150cm?

[Old_Thrashbarg]

I believe there's a powerful status quo bias.

Doing the reversal test, if programming languages had all been 1-indexed, then I doubt we'd hear much from people, in 2022, saying "I think the first element should be 0, and the second 1".

[bentcorner]

> The 1 makes a lot of sense in a human world, when we count, we start at 1

As a kid I learned "one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand" when counting time out loud, but at some point I realized this was incorrect. The prefix is the start of the nth second but it isn't complete yet, so for example stopping in the middle of saying "two one-thousand" you actually haven't reached two seconds yet.

My fix was to move the prefix to the end, so I say "one-thousand one, one-thousand two, one-thousand three".

In retrospect maybe I should have used "zero one-thousand, one one-thousand, two one-thousand".

[ziml77]

I don't think it's necessary incorrect to start at one there. If someone asks you to count out 3 seconds, you're going to say "one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand" and only at the end of the "three one-thousand" will you have considered the 3 seconds to have actually elapsed. Basically you're already accounting for the time it's taking you to say it. Which to me seems better because if you do it the other way because it gives a better heads up as to when that second has been reached.

[8note]

None one-thousand, one one-thousand, two etc

Doesnt sound half bad

[bregma]

Ah, yes. Cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers both end in the word "numbers" so they're the same thing. No need to distinguish between having three apples and having the third apple.

[Old_Thrashbarg]

If you ask most people to just label their apples, they'd call the first one "1", and so on. Very few people would say, "please pass me apple #0".

[goatlover]

And if someone did say that to me, I would pass them no apple, since that's how we use everyday language. And if I knew they were a programmer, I'd first ask them in which programming language they'd wish me to pass the apple.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Yes, but "human-focused" 1-based indexing comes at a cost since at the end of the day the CPU has to add (index * element-size) to the array base address to get the address of the indexed element. With a 1-based index there's additional overhead in either having to subtract 1 from the index or to have a wasted "element 0" to avoid the need to do that.

[copperx]

I assure you, that if we counted from zero, there would be an instruction to add and multiply in the same number of cycles as a multiply.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

That's not possible - the subtract and multiply need to be consecutive (adjust index before multiply by element size), so even if it was a single instruction it would still take longer than a multiply that didn't have to wait for a preceding subtraction.

The only way to avoid the speed penalty would be either to have a wasted element at offset 0, or to maintain the array base address as (address - (1 * element-size)) to avoid having to subtract 1 from the index when accessing. In the latter case for dynamically allocated arrays the code would still have to do a subtraction to adjust the pointer returned by the memory allocator, but at least that would be a 1-time penalty rather than per-element-access.

Of course this is supposing a high level language where an array is abstraction, not one explicity aliased to a chunk of memory such as C where an array and a pointer to it's first element are interchangeable.

[copperx]

That goes against my intuition. Multiplication in hardware to this day relies on addition. Is one adder going to add an extra cycle? Or would that time be amortized? Take a look at slides 45-46 here. https://acg.cis.upenn.edu/milom/cis371-Spring08/lectures/04_...

Do you know the answer to that question? (I don't, but if someone does, it will settle this issue).

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I don't know, but looking at that 3-input add makes me think you may be right and the extra addition/subtraction could perhaps be combined into the multiplication.

OTOH, for arrays who's contents are size 2^n (char, short, int, long) I'm sure the generated code isn't using multiply in the first place.

Anyways, an optimizing compiler could certainly remove much of any overhead added by 1-based indexing .. for an array access in a for loop it could, if necessary, calculate the "base-1" address once at start of loop.

Personally, having grown up with assembler and C, and still using C++ today, I'm quite happy with 0-based.

[thayne]

There are a lot of cases where a zero index makes sense. In physics and math there are cases where you start the index at 0 and others where you start at 1. And even some where you start at -1. Which you use depends on what is most convenient for the problem at hand.

[jcelerier]

At which number starts the first centimeter on a ruler ?

[RunSet]

At which number starts the zeroth centimeter on a ruler?

[jcelerier]

it's the first and it is 0, just like the first index in a C array is 0

[analog31]

I always thought of the machine focus being that the location of the first element was the location of the array plus zero.

[croes]

If you think of the index as an offset you would start with 0.

BTW on which level is the 1st floor?

[t_mann]

> BTW on which level is the 1st floor?

in Europe or in the US?

[ethbr0]

Does Europe has a zero floor? Please tell me Europe zero-indexes their stories!

[t_mann]

They do, it's called the ground floor.

[espadrine]

In France, it is called the rez-de-chaussée. The “premier étage” (literally translated as “first floor”) is what the US calls the second floor.

[mananaysiempre]

A particularly topographically challenged building in Paris has exits to two enclosing streets end up on different floors. The elevator is numbered -2, -1, rez-de-rue [exit north], rez-de-chaussée [exit south], 1, 2, ... .

[988747]

Don't know French, but I wonder if the meaning of "etage" is similar to Polish "piętro", which literaly means something like "elevation". So, basically in Polish we have a specific word for ground level, and then we count how much elevated above the the ground the current level is. That's why "1st floor" is the one "elevated one level above the ground".

In English you count "floors" and floor is a usable, hard surface on which you can put something, like a chair. That's why a floor on the ground level is treated the same as the floor above it - it is equally good on accommodating chairs, beds, and other stuff.

[Zardoz84]

"Bajo" in Spain

[copperx]

I've always called floor zero and everybody understands.

[jeltz]

Yeah, most or all of Europe does that. In English it is called ground floor, first floor, etc. In Swedish the zero numbering makes total sense becasuse instead of numbering the floors we say ground floor, "1 stair", "2 stairs", etc.

[hougaard]

That depends on your language and culture, "floor" is not easily translated, some languages have a word describing all the layers added to the base layer, so "1. sal" (Danish as an example) actually means "the first layer added on top of the base house".

Again, this is more a spoken language/culture thing, and this goes back to what premises we use to communicate with the machines, ours or the machines...

[enobrev]

You've got ...P3, P2, P1, G, M, 1, 2, 3...

[shadowofneptune]

In Tucson I've seen some buildings where the basement is the first floor. You enter at floor two.

[childintime]

Nobody knows that one.

No elevator I've seen has yet taken a cue from UI design: simply put the buttons within an outline of the building, along with the local numbering scheme.

No more visits to the serial killer lurking in the basement.

The players in this market evidently have been operating at T'ump levels of intelligence. /s