> as we do in all other aspects of life
You mean like elevators? You may be surprised to learn that elevators in America are 1-indexed (ground floor == floor 1), but in Europe they are 0-indexed (ground floor == floor 0).
You mean like elevators? You may be surprised to learn that elevators in America are 1-indexed (ground floor == floor 1), but in Europe they are 0-indexed (ground floor == floor 0).
In most European countries the ground floor is not considered the same thing as the others. As Wikipedia puts it: "In most of Europe, the "first floor" is the first level above ground level".
We consider and count as floors the "layers" above the ground level. In french for example, the ground level is called "rez-de-chaussée" and the floors above it "XX étage". The ground level is not an "étage" (in American terms, the "ground level" is not considered a floor, and is not counted among the floors).
For this reason, apart from elevator labels nobody calls the ground level "the 0th floor" when speaking/writing.
And even in elevators, O is just used as a convenient way to convey the ground level (since the buttons don't fit much) -- and not everywhere. In many elevators it gets it own designation (e.g. G or GRD or some other national variety).
It's "the ground level" (with different names per country) + "N floors".
A multi-floor building with ground floor + 3 floors can even named "3rd-storey building" in some countries (and the ground level is just taken as granted) -- e.g. une maison à deux étages in the UK --> 3 story building in the US.
I think you just refuted your own previous assertion that 1-indexing is universal in all other aspects of life.
So, no 0-based indexing here.
We call the house a "3-storey house" not because we zero index, but because the cardinality of it's floors (as europeans define a floor) is 3. In "3-storey building" for Europeans, 3 is the "length", not the last index.
It's no more zero-based indexing than naming relations as “sibling”,“first cousin”,“second cousin” is, just because some hypothetical culture that also uses 1-based indexing but counts siblings as first cousins might rationalize our system as starting with “zeroth cousins” where they have “first cousins”.
What they have merely names what Americans name as zero.
But it's not a stand-in for zero, for us, it's a different entity (a different thing).
A floor (etage, piano, orofos, etc) is a "layer of building where people live above the ground level layer".
So there's no zero-based indexing of floors, because the first item in the set of what are considered as floors is called "first" (e.g. primo in italian).
So, the thing one must understand before they say "same difference", is the other cultural difference: that most European countries don't consider the ground level "floor" to be a floor/story.
I.e, we don't consider the upper floors and the "ground floor" to be in the same set. Which is also why we don't count them when we say a "2 story house" (and we mean a house with 3 such layers, ground story + 2 stories).
Is there a zero-based indexing of the whole "heterogenous" set of ground level + floors?
Well, it's common to have the ground level designated with G or national specific names: BG, BV, E, IS, PB, PT, RC, S, P, PK, etc.
It's just that in some elevators 0 is a substitute for this -- which is probably due to the few common brands and parts being international and nobody bothering to change them (e.g. Otis). That's more a red herring than how Europeans think about floors or index them.
So the floors are numbered according to their distance above the ground level (whatever that's called). This matches my suggestion of treating zero-based indexing as a distance from the first element.
>> Is there a zero-based indexing of the whole "heterogenous" set of ground level + floors?
Yes there is! It's how the elevator buttons are labeled with the possible variation of using a label instead of "0".
The European elevator numbering scheme according to your own comments matches more closely with a zero-based indexing scheme than a 1-based. Or more precisely it matches my proposal to consider the numbers used to reference array elements as distances rather than indexes.
It is true that some elevators label the ground level 0, but this is usually when there are also negative levels (cellars).
The German word Stockwerk is even clearer. It describes the wooden planks which separates two levels. So if you live on the first Stockwerk you live one level above ground.