Formally, ordinals start at zero too :-) [0]. We owe their latest definition to Von Neumann, but AFAIK, the former definitions were similar. Regarding 5-ht, I

Formally, ordinals start at zero too :-) [0]. We owe their latest definition to Von Neumann, but AFAIK, the former definitions were similar. Regarding 5-ht, I quoted from memory, which was apparently fuzzy... But is is indeed fascinating. -- [0] This is meta-meta-contrarianism. - The layman counts from 1 - The uptight programmer counts from zero, because Dijkstra said so (or so he thinks). - The meta-contrarian (I used to be one) says fuck it, ordinals start at one. - The meta-meta-contrarian reads Wikipedia[1], realizes he was formally wrong, and goes one step further in pedanticity, back to zero [0]. That being said, my brain prefers 1-indexing programming languages like Lua, Julia, R and Matlab... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number [0] Help! I'm stuck in a Boolean algebra[1][0]! [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebras_canonically_defined http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebras_canonically_de... [0] ... where xor is an addition that wraps around ...