4 ms·
He’s not wrong, but ask any normal person “What’s the first thing on this list” and see what happens…
by heisenzombie 3y ago
He’s not wrong, but ask any normal person “What’s the first thing on this list” and see what happens…
- threatripper 3y agoFor me first and one are synonyms. It's even abbreviated as 1st instead of 0st.
- benoliver999 3y ago"Here's your zero place medal"
- thaliaarchi 3y agoThis reminds me of when I used zeroeth, oneth, twoth, and threeth, instead of first, second, and third, for referring to indices 0, 1, 2, and 3 as a TA. It's less verbose than “at index zero”, but feels a little clumsy.
- afiori 3y agoZeroth is an actual word, I heard it many times in conversation between methematicians.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jacknews 3y agoSure but then what do you call the subsequent items?
- afiori 3y agofirst, second and so on
- jacknews 3y agoSo the 'first' item in the list is actually the second? The problem is you're trying to redefine English (and probably most other languages). The first item on a menu is, well the first item, like first place in a marathon, the first day of the month. Surely a definition of the zeroth item would be something like an item that does not exist, the item that's left when you take away all the other items, etc. Ordinals are 1-indexed. Language is 1-indexed; The #1 player is the best player, and so on.
- afiori 3y agozeroth is the ordinal associated with the cardinal zero. For example christmas is the zeroth day after christmas. A common advice with regards to user inputs is that if you do not do ordering or arithmetic on a piece of data (eg a phone numbers) then it should be a string even if it is numeric. Similarly n-indexed conventions should be considered in terms of practical pros and cons. Linguistic similarity is not a convincing argument to me.
- jacknews 3y ago'associated'? Sounds nice, but not very convincing, except perhaps the zeroth item of an ordered set should be just that, 0. I agree indexing is a trade-off, sometimes 0 is best, sometimes 1 makes more sense. But it's not linguistic 'similarity'. You have to name things. If your names are off-by-one (the element named 'first' is actually the second) you're just sowing confusion.
- afiori 3y agosometime ordinals are more natural sometimes cardinals are more natural. In the case of vectors (especially of C-style arrays) I would say that A[0] is the first element in the array. I agree that things should have names, but names serve us, not us them.
- afiori 3y agoThis is the same argument as saying that object->method(arg) is superior to funtion(self, args) because it maps to the SVO english grammar.