4 ms·
This 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 le
by thaliaarchi 3y ago
This 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.