[andromaton]

Yes, I also had found that paper to be surprisingly and disappointedly hand wavey. "Don't meet your heroes" type of thing. Math does not care about pointer arithmetic and i in summation and induction starts at 1. Same in Julia. It's an higher level accommodation to machine code primitives, which are indeed less gate expensive if indexes start at zero.

[kevinventullo]

In addition to code, I think 0-indexing is also a nice convention for floor numbering. That way the Nth floor is N floors up from the ground level. This is already how basement levels work.

[Yizahi]

0-based floor numbering is infuriating. Telling someone that you live on the third floor which is actually numbered 2 is honestly dumb. I had to emigrate from the 1-based floor country a year ago and first floor numbered 0 is still throwing me off sometimes. And every single time I want to raise attention to a window somewhere.

[goto11]

If we admit negative numbers for basements, then were are not using the natural numbers anymore. This is a completely different question since the integers does not have a beginning.

[andromaton]

I agree. Touche!

[andromaton]

This is not a 6-hour slow risposte; it's my 6 hour anti procrastinate filter I swear. Anyway, just like all animals of habit, I immediately I agreed with floor zero because I come from a place where the lowest floor is not floor 1 (unlike the US). However, I can see somebody saying floor is the height of the ceiling, so floor 1 = 10 feet; floor 0 (underground) 0 feet. One thing we can all agree is that the calendar, without a zero, it's pretty bad.

[threatofrain]

I’m not sure about this. I’ve seen more index from 0 for induction and summation in Analysis.