Off by one solitude

Exactly what this reminded me of. Thanks.

If the walkway goes inside the building, then yes. And the walkway usually leads directly to the second floor, because the airplane door is 3 metres above the ground.

They dance whenever they're gable?

Rulers measure cardinal quantities and not ordinal ones. There is no cardinal numbering scheme that starts at 1, all of them "start" at 0. For ordinal numbering schemes, the symbols are arbitrary anyway and you can start with whatever you want. It's equally valid to start with 1, 0, -1, A, or "aardvark". The only benefit to picking 1 as the start is to make it easier to count with your fingers while picking 0 lets you easily convert an ordinal quantity to a cardinal one.

Your job is to move apples from one bin to another. You pick up the first one and set it in the other bin, and say "zero."?

I've seen a lot of rulers that actually don't have a mark at 0 and instead go right to the edge as 0. Typically they are worn down, being made of wood, so the accuracy of the first inch is dubious. To ensure the distance is correct, sliding the ruler down one unit is a good idea. So, my ruler starts at 0 but my measurements start at 1.

Not on this side of the pond. We typically don't have a ground floor, that's just the first floor.

i wish the people making buildings around here knew that. some start at floor 3, others at 5. some start at 0. others at 2. every building has its own story. you need to understand the building before you can understand your position in it.

Dangit Bobby!

They hate each other because they are intolerant to one another's index choices

i wonder why people haven’t made a language that starts indexing at 2 yet. maybe some day

in my understanding offset is technically the "relative index", or how much you have to go further

Yes they are presented in the programmer wrong. The first thing in memory should have offset 0 and index 1

There's no such thing as "zeroith" because it's called "zeroth — being numbered zero in a series"

This works for building storeys, this would work equally well for tables. The only reason this is not used often is because the series are rarely zero-based in anything that doesn't also want to equate index and offset.

You're right that first may be read as "opposite of last", that would add to the confusion, but that's just natural language not being precise enough.

Edit: spelling

Edit2: also, if you extend that logic, when you're presented with an ordinal number, you would need to first check all the options, sort them, and then apply the position you're asked, that's not really how people would expect ordinal number to be treated, not me, at the very least

I kind of brought this up in another comment, that "first" and "1st" aren't really the same thing. Which is confusing when you extend that to fourth/4th five/5th. I don't generally see someone write "zeroith", but I'll see "0th".

That's a problem when you get to the fourth.

That's because the word "first" in first() uses one-based indexing. In true programmer fashion it would have been called zeroth() but that is wholly unintuitive to most humans.

I maintain that the element with the lowest index is called the "zeroth" element in zero-based indexing and "first" in one-based indexing. The element with index N is the Nth element.

Ordinal vs. cardinal. It's "first" not "onest", right? Even the ancient proto-Germanic speakers could tell there's a difference. (In fact, it's basically a contraction of "foremost", and has nothing to do with numbers; their weak numeracy was an advantage on this topic)

If we weren't implicitly choosing 1-indexing it would be 1nd for "second" (and still not "onend" or something). That breaks down once you get to third and fourth, though.