Although often with an implicit zero. Under typical North American culture, your 1st birthday, for example, is more accurately the first anniversary of your birthday. Your birth is zero indexed.
Most human counting uses end-index. I.e. "1" is after 1-thing (has passed, is physically obtained, etc.).
Most computer counting uses start-index + length, for efficiency and to better generalize. I.e. "1" is at the memory address immediately before the "1"st item.
Which ultimately creates the "0 index is 1st thing" linguistic confusion.
PS: Also, language predates computers by a few years, and the concept of zero is hard.
i think a more accurate and complete idea is that humans refer to a thing in its entirety, with things being lined up and scanned in order as only a potential convenience
if you ask someone to identify an object, they'll point to the middle (or center of the most important component) of the object, not to the 'start' or 'end' of it in their field of vision..
that said, the human perspective is subtle and convenient in completely different ways to how a computer manages memory, and this 'end-index' idea seems like a useful way to map the human whole-object perspective to a linear memory-index perspective
The assumption is that the thing is its entirety, as you said.
Hypothetically, I imagine an array index reference, in human terms, would be communicated as "this thing starts here" or "this is the beginning of this thing."
Which isn't a concept or phrasing we have much occasion to use, other than for routes or long length-measured objects?
Indeed they are, which is why I literally said so in the previous comment. Did you forget to finish reading it?
> They do not include the event itself.
That is true because the event itself is implied information. There is no value in speaking of it. If you stand before us, we can be certain that you had a day of birth (your 0th anniversary). We don't necessarily know how many times you've gone around the sun following that, however, so that is where we find value in communicating additional information.
If you were counting apples, there is the state where you have no apples (index 0), the state where you have one apple (index 1), the state where you have two apples (index 2), etc. When counting you don't need to worry about index 0 because the no apple state is naturally implied. It only becomes interesting and worthy of communication when you have at least one apple to speak of, thus you start at 1. The state found at index 0 is still implicitly there, though.
0!=null
I say it has less weight as birthday is a compound word, the root words of which suggest that your first birthday could logically be the day of your birth rather than a year after it.
My first weddingday was not a year after I got married. My first graduationday was not a year after I graduated.
There's no culture where you're born at 1 year old and turn 2 on New Years when everyone gets older?
You sure?
If you have 4 classes in school today, you would never talk about the 1st class as number 0, the last one is the 4th, not the 3rd.
I am assuming that the reader is biased towards the average HN user. That won't always work for everyone who will come across my comment, but close enough for an unpaid contribution. I'm not about to write a novel to make sure I catch every edge case.
So, if you're born on December 31st, you're two years old the next day. (I see no problem, but apparently some people are hung up on such minor details. I can't fathom why.)
That makes no sense to me. It's also your first century. Does that make you one century old? Of course not! The moment you're born, you're not even one hour old, let alone one day.
It could be though that Korea simply never encountered the Mayan or Arabic civilizations as most did encounter one of those two in history, who are famously known to have independently discovered the concept of zero.
Birth of an array can only logically be defined as index zero, the same as a child. The concept of zero was not universal globally and Korea is pretty isolated.
Americans and their alcohol laws…
In fact, this whole discussion is more about a choice of phrasing rather than the numbers. When indexing arrays, sometimes we're talking about an offset from the first element (starting with "0"), and sometimes we're talking about ordinal element numbers (starting with "first"). Some programming language designers found that offsets are more useful (because that choice tends to simplify the underlying arithmetic), while others found that ordinal numbers are more useful (because the word "first" should mean "1", to simplify communication between people).
But gregorian epoch itself is 1-based. 1AD (0001-01-01) goes right after 1BC (-0001-12-31). There was no 0000-mm-dd. That's why 3rd "millenium" and 21st century started at 2001-01-01 and not at 2000-01-01. YYYY means not how many whole years already passed, but which incomplete year goes right now. On the other hand, your age means "whole years passed since birth [plus maybe a few months]".
And the birthdays are definitely 1 indexed: you denote your first birthday with 1, and not with 0, and so on. You don't denote any birthdays of yours with 0. You may denote something else with it, but birthdays[0] gives an out of range exception. (Especially true in French, where birthdays are called anniversaire, but in English too.)
On the other hand a computer/car/house can also be 10 years old but not 0.
Really? When I buy a new PC, to me it will get 1 year old only after a year. Before that it is just NEW. Is that what you meant?
That's why zero-based indexing is good!
In some cultures you are considered 1 the moment you are born, so the zero indexing isn't universal here, but typical in North America as noted earlier.
You can't possibly be serious.
Is the empty set countable? (Yes.)
Dictionary:
nat·u·ral num·bers
the positive integers (whole numbers) 1, 2, 3, etc., and sometimes zero as well
Set theory:
> Equivalently, a set S is countable if there exists an injective function f : S → N from S to N; it simply means that every element in S corresponds to a different element in N.
Defining N is usually done via a successor set, on which case 0 makes no sense to include.
Standard construction of ordinals is that each ordinal is the set of all its predecessors. (0 has no predecessors , hence 0 is the empty set.) (And so finite ordinals have the same ordinaliity as cardinality).
Birthdays are clearly 1 indexed, the first birthday is indexed with 1, and not with 0.
Birthday[0] gives you an out of range exception, since there is no birthday called 0th. Birthdays are [first,second,..] indexed from 1: brithday[1] = first, birthday[2] = second, and so on. That's what indexing a series from 1 means.
Suppose your job is to count some events. You check in for work at 8:00 a.m., but the first event has not registered until noon. By your logic you should not be paid for four hours, because you're paid to count, and counting started at 1.
Your pedometer?
Your traffic clicker?
We are talking about the he numbering, not the work-doing.
You start waiting at 8, and you wait between events. But you only count (increment) when an event happens.
The 0 comes for free when you are ready to count (hello golang and C++, as well as human intuition).
When you count stars in the sky you don't say "0, 1, 2".
You say "..., 1, 2", or if no stars show up, you say "there are 0" after timer expires.
Increment what?
> When you count stars in the sky you don't say "0, 1, 2".
No, you say, "I'm going to start counting stars now. Okay, 1, 2, ...".
The preparation part is the zero. You counted stars before and reached some number; you're not starting at that number.
If you just look at an empty space, the # of apples is equivalent is equivalent to the # of dinosaurs, but they're only equivalent by their absence.
I then put it in an initially empty bowl
The milliliters in a baker's cup are a scale based on 0!
nitpick: unless you were born on Feb 29.
The nice part is that now February 29 "just works" the downside is the impedance between how months and days are numbered and a how an offset from the epoch(beginning of the year) is defined. January 3rd(1-3) is stored as "0 months 2 days" as when it hits, 0 months have passed and 2 days have passed.
So the specific case of February 29 hits when 1 month has passed and 28 days have passed. 3 years out of 4 this will be the same as "2 months 0 days"(3-1) but every forth year this will be(2-28). As an aside, and the specific reason I went with interval types, every event past feburary 29 works just fine with or without a leapyear, that is, the extra day in the middle does not mess up the offset to days after it.
Honestly I curse a little as I wish months and days were 0-based. At least clocks get this right, almost, 12 hour clocks are a special breed of stupid. start at 12, then go to 1 and proceed up to 11. 24 hour clocks properly start at 0. The worst part about 12 hour clocks is that it is almost correct, replace the 12 with a 0 and it every thing be the same but now it makes sense from a moduler math point of view.
A special curse is reserved when I think about how there is no year zero. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/functions-datetime.html#F...
If that's the case, then how did the ancient Greeks or Romans count before zero was an acceptable concept in their counting system?
There is a narrowing from "nothing at all" to "zero apples" which doesn't happen 'in the world' but is a necessary precondition to counting apples. The existence of any apple is a requirement for there to be zero of them before you put anything in the basket.
Another definition might be from conception. But birth being “one year old” is illogical. The sperm didn’t even exist yet, one year before birth.
Your first birthday is the first anniversary of your birth day.
We celebrate the anniversaries of our birth day.
That is not the case with age or birthdays which are, thankfully, zero indexed. The first year of human life is age=0, birthdays=0.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_year_numbering
1. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/time/temporal...
So as far as your job is concerned, that's when they start. Hope that helps.