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Comment by bregma | Hacker News Reader

If you ask people which floor of building they're on, it's going to depend on which country they're in. In North America, at least, the first floor you walk into (in a sane city: I understand there are some which do not qualify in this respect due to hills or historic disaster recovery) is the first floor. On other continents, you enter the ground floor and need to take stairs or an elevating device to get to the first floor.

"Natural" zero-based counting at its best.

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A big international corporation (Siemens) had, at one point, standardized their buildings world wide to have room numbers starting with 2 on the ground floor, 3 on the floor above etc., leaving space for two basements.

All room numbers were 5 digits, and skipped numbers if there were multiple windows in one room, based on the theory that such a room might later be sub-divided, and wanting to avoid renumbering of rooms down the hallway.

(I encountered this around 2003, so might have well changed since then; didn't find any references only with a quick search).

I worked for them relatively recently and didn't encounter this; or at least never noticed. Then again, our office building was an open office plan where desks next to the windows and rooms (conference or office) were all in the center of each floor.

The ground floor is 0. The floor above 0 is 1. The floor below 0 is -1. Anything else is crazy TBH, the whole point of integer numbers is to count things that start at a defined point and go opposite ways. Why shift it and then reinvent weird pseudo-negative numbers like S1?

But then again people measure distance in feet and write dates as month day year :)

It would be nice if this was the case. In grad school I taught in a building that was on a hill and had once been separate buildings so different entrances were on different floor and the transition between the former separate buildings was 4 stairs.

So there was a floor with rooms numbered 1xx and 0xx. There was also a floor below the 0xx floor. They just numbered it 00xx. And you could enter the building on any of those floors depending on what door you picked.

The class I taught was in 0005. Room 005 was someone's office. So on the first day of every semester we would have students waiting outside the door of 005 instead of 0005...

You'd think if they had to go below 0 they could just prefix with a letter, like B (Below? Basement?) B1, B2, etc.

Could this be Dwinelle Hall at UC Berkeley?

nope. IU

Cool, Dwinelle at Berkeley is a fascinatingly bizarre building for seemingly very similar reasons, and (if I remember correctly) also with pretty much the same weird numbering system plus tiny staircases to adjust for mismatched heights between floors!

Counterpoint: because floors are sum types.

Floors 1 through 10 are "regular" floors. L is the lobby. P1 through P3 are the parking (basement) levels.

So you have three types: regular, lobby, and parking. And the elevator labels are of type regular | lobby | parking.

(Now you can't disagree with me because sum types are popular on HN, and I have framed this in terms of sum types.)

Sum types don't automatically define ordering between the possible values AFAIK? So in your implementation you'd have to manually define the

    up: (regular | lobby | parking) -> (regular | lobby | parking)

    down: (regular | lobby | parking) -> (regular | lobby | parking)

and

    which_way: (regular | lobby | parking) x (regular | lobby | parking) -> direction

If you use subset of integers you can just use operators inc, dec and <.

Yeah I know it was a joke.

If I build a building in the shape of a double helix, what order are the two floors in?

Hmm, are there actually an infinite number of floors? Do we need to switch to floating point?

> If I build a building in the shape of a double helix, what order are the two floors in?

Why separate the floors that are on the same level?

> Hmm, are there actually an infinite number of floors?

I assumed there isn't and that we use a subset of integers. If you have infinite number of floors - feel free to use full set of integers (if you have enough memory that is).

> Do we need to switch to floating point?

No point, if you have more than aleph0 floors - floats won't help you.

This is how it should be, but the only country in the world, AFAIK, that does it that way is Germany.

Not german here, this is standard and I'm a bit confused by your comment.

0 is ground floor.

I think the only country i've been which does not do this is the US. It was pretty weird at first

There’s some confusion here about the exact word being used. The German word that is mistranslated here as “floor” is “Stock”, which actually means “addition”. So the floor above the ground floor is the first addition, not the “first floor”.

We have a building at the local university that has ground at one end level with transitory step between floors -1 and 0, you enter the building through the stair well, and descend or ascend to get to a floor. I wouldn't be surprised if an architect designed a building that did this on flat ground, violating the ability to number floors relative to ground with integers.

When I was at Leeds University the ground floor of the Physics Admin building was Level 6 (it went up to Level 11). It was built on a hill and according to legend this allowed room for expansion (which never happened) down the hill without requiring negative floor numbers.

To add to the fun the only continuous corridor through the entire T-shaped building was on Level 10, one end of which (the base of the T) was at ground level on its part of the hill. There was a famous 'kink' in the middle of the top / cross-bar of the T (apparently the longest corridor in Europe) because they started building from each end and were slightly off.

I always said it was an argument between the counting of things versus the relative offset of things.

This is a great example.

I call `array[0]` the first element. I don't know what you'll think of that.

I wonder how many multiples of people who like arguing about starting from 1 vs 0 and how many people were confused for more than a day

The Patterson Building at Acadia University in Wolfville, NS, has a basement and four floors. The rooms on the first floor are numbered 1XX, second floor 2XX, etc. up to the top floor 4XX.

The elevator, however, goes from floor '1' (the basement), to floor '5' (the top or fourth floor).

This really confuses visitors.

The Elevator Mafia want $10,000 to fix it.

I've been living in North America for decades. Every building has G (zero). This is the floor that you walk into and has a lobby. The next floor up is 1 as such is labeled in the elevator.

So your initial assumption is incorrect from my experience.

What city are you in, out of curiosity?

SF Bay Area (currently), but have lived in several major metro areas.

This is not my experience in the US. Most places either have G or 1 for the first floor. Then 2 for the next. So some elevators say G, then 2, 3, and so on.

I've seen setups like you mention, but they definitely aren't the majority in places I've lived.

I'll have to look actively next time I ride an elevator, this is just from my recollection.

A lot of elevators in US do indeed have G for the ground floor, but that's because they are made by ThyssenKrupp AG, a German company ;).

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