[GTALUG] zero [was Re: Favorite desktop manager?]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: o1bigtenor via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| (Except for the idea of 0 being an actual counter as it is in only the computing
| world.)

I think that you are referring to C using 0 as the subscript for the
first element of an array.

An interesting issue.

I agree that 0 should not be an ordinal number.  In grade school we
called these ordinal Natural Numbers.  However mathematicians usually
think that 0 is a Natural number.  Read the first paragraph of
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_number>

Zero is a good cardinal number (for designating the size of sets).  In
grade school we called them Whole Numbers.

Anything more inclusive has zero: integers, rationals, real,
imaginary, complex, ...

BUT:

Any experienced programmer finds the C convention more convenient in
many little ways.

I think that many mathematicians number elements of sequences starting
at 0.

The lowest term of a polynomial in x will be the x^0 term.

On the other hand, I've not seen a math matrix with a 0 row or column.