Formally, ordinals start at zero [0]. We owe their latest definition to Von Neumann, but former (technical) definitions were similar. -- [0] This is meta-meta

Formally, ordinals start at zero [0]. We owe their latest definition to Von Neumann, but former (technical) definitions were similar. -- [0] This is meta-meta-contrarianism. - The layman counts from one - The uptight programmer counts from zero, because he thinks Dijkstra said so [1]. - The meta-contrarian (which I used to be) says fuck it, ordinals start at one [0]. - The meta-meta-contrarian reads Von Neumann[1], realizes he was formally wrong, and goes one step further in pedanticity, back to zero [0]. [1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EW... [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number_%28linguistics%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number_%28linguistics%2... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number#Von_Neumann_definition_of_ordinals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number#Von_Neumann_defi... [0] Help! I'm trapped in a Boolean algebra[1][0]! [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebras_canonically_de.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebras_canonically_de.... [0] ... where xor is an addition that wraps around ... That being said, my brain prefers 1-indexing programming languages like Lua, Julia, R and Matlab...