[vouwfietsman]

But what is there to gain with this distinction?

Just the convenience of having an ordinal number to say? Rather than saying "chapter 0, chapter 1, chapter 2" one can say "the fourth chapter"? Or is it the fact that the chapter with number 4 has 3 chapters preceding it?

On first glance I find this all rather meaningless pedantry.

[oh_my_goodness]

If I use ordinal numbers to count, then counting tells me the number of objects. Sometimes I want to know the number of objects.

EDIT: Yeah, I don't know why book chapter labels shouldn't start with "0". It seems fine to me. They could use letters instead of numbers for all I care.

[zkmon]

If they use letters instead of numbers, note that letter "A" is the first alphabet, not zeroth alphabet.

[oh_my_goodness]

When I'm counting letters it's more convenient to go "one, two, three." When I'm finding the offset between letters it's more convenient to go "zero, one, two." Neither of these methods is going to displace the other.

Definitions are fine, and I agree that "A" is the first letter. But that's no use to people who need to think clearly about the offset between "A" and "C" right now. Should I tell them they're wrong, they have to count to three and then subtract one? Because the dictionary says so?

[zkmon]

Offset is an answer to the question "where does Nth memory location start from?". The answer is "after N-1 locations". It's the count of locations that need to be skipped by the reader, to reach the start of Nth memory location.

Book chapters and page numbers are not offsets.

[vouwfietsman]

> Book chapter numbers are ordinal numbers

> Book chapters and page numbers are not offsets.

I don't know but I feel like you are making a point out of something arbitrary. When I listen to an audio book, everyone always says: "Chapter 1", not "the first chapter" so why is this important?

I think extreme attention to to arbitrary meaningless details is how we ended up with most rules in language that we are starting to collectively detest.