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

[Evan Leibovitch]

I find an interesting-tho-trivial bit of culture shock in going between
North America and elsewhere (generally, in my experience): floor
designations in buildings.

In North America the "first floor" of a building is usually considered to
be where the lobby and ground exit is located.
Elsewhere, it's usually referred to as the "main floor", and the floor
above that is the first floor. Indeed, in elevators of such buildings the
"main floor" is often indicated with a zero button (and the basement is
"-1" rather than "B").
Maybe there's an anthropology lesson somewhere on how and why these ideas
diverged.

Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada
@evanleibovitch / @el56


On Fri, Jul 28, 2023 at 3:23 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

> | 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.
> ---
> Post to this mailing list talk at gtalug.org
> Unsubscribe from this mailing list
> https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gtalug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20230728/c810f245/attachment.html>