Why the fuck would you spell it “1st” if it’s not 1?
Edit: Which is not pronounced “onest”. I think people might be missing the point here; I’m actually a fan of zero indexing.
I feel like the joke would’ve landed better if it said “first”. I know it’s pronounced the same way, but I’m gonna argue anyway that there’s a subtle difference. I’ve heard 0th used in cs to describe what was at the 0-index, so in that context 1st would be"second", but “first” generally means “nothing before it”. English is weird. I wonder if anyone knows whether the word “first” or “1st” came 1st (lol)?
Ordinal vs. cardinal. It’s “first” not “onest”, right? Even the ancient proto-Germanic speakers could tell there’s a difference. (In fact, it’s basically a contraction of “foremost”, and has nothing to do with numbers; their weak numeracy was an advantage on this topic)
If we weren’t implicitly choosing 1-indexing it would be 1nd for “second” (and still not “onend” or something). That breaks down once you get to third and fourth, though.
programmer linguistigs is certainly something to behold.
Fun fact, Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories were and are the foundation of parsing.
They said 1st as an abbreviation of first (it’s a normal abbreviation 1st, 2nd, 3rd … 7th abbreviate first, second, third … seventh)
Sure, but you have to see how it’s an own goal if you’re showing up to table 0.
Interestingly, we’ve got the same glitch in the Gregorian calendar, where the year 0 doesn’t exist. So the 21st century started in 2001…
Yup. We should really zero-index century names and years AD/BC as well, but we don’t. If we were still using Roman numerals it would be no big deal, but we rarely do, so there’s a confusing clash. I’m not sure if it was this programming humour community or another where I had a big exchange on the topic before.
I suppose you could have some kind of positional system that’s one-indexed, so 999AD = 1111999AD, and 2000 would be written 2111, but you’d have to completely redo the way arithmetic works, and that defeats the point a bit. And, the new 999 would not be our 999, because it’s effectively base 9.
What more can I say
Also the plot of Before Sunset 🏆
🙅 zeroth, first, second, third
👉 Zerost, onest, twost, threestGood luck standardizing English
Englist*
Northern England just got a new nickname.
I’m the twost two that’s ever twoed.
Plot twist, neither cared about the table number
One went to the first table produced, the other to the first table placed
In the UK it’s called a ground table.
When you get off an airplane, do you say
“Its great to be back on solid first floor of the earth.”
?
If the walkway goes inside the building, then yes. And the walkway usually leads directly to the second floor, because the airplane door is 3 metres above the ground.
OK but what about going onto the ground?
Like, in your garden, is that the first floor of the planet?
Inside the building it’s the first floor, even if it’s exactly at the sea level altitude. Outside the building it’s the ground. Basement levels start at minus one, there is no zeroth floor.
Exactly, the idea that you go up a floor because there’s a roof over your head is very silly.
So it was a spelling mistake? They’re actually The Knights of The Ground Table!
They dance whenever they’re gable?
do you also have minced tables there?
Isn’t the guy at the zeroith table?
Yes, and if he texted “Hey, I’m at the zeroith table” and the woman replied with the sibling comment then you know to run far and run fast.
There is no such thing as “zeroith”. Does not matter which numbers you slap on the tables, the one with the lowest number will always be the first. The word “first” has nothing to do with indices, it’s just an antonym for “last”.
That’s a problem when you get to the fourth.
I kind of brought this up in another comment, that “first” and “1st” aren’t really the same thing. Which is confusing when you extend that to fourth/4th five/5th. I don’t generally see someone write “zeroith”, but I’ll see “0th”.
And here I thought people write “1st” because they are lazy and want to press 3 keys instead of 5.
First and 1st are certainly different symbols for the same concept
The spelling for the index before the first is zeroth, no need to insert an extra vowel
There’s no such thing as “zeroith” because it’s called “zeroth — being numbered zero in a series”
This works for building storeys, this would work equally well for tables. The only reason this is not used often is because the series are rarely zero-based in anything that doesn’t also want to equate index and offset.
You’re right that first may be read as “opposite of last”, that would add to the confusion, but that’s just natural language not being precise enough.
Edit: spelling
Edit2: also, if you extend that logic, when you’re presented with an ordinal number, you would need to first check all the options, sort them, and then apply the position you’re asked, that’s not really how people would expect ordinal number to be treated, not me, at the very least
Americans also index their building floors from 1
A two storey American building has floors 1 and 2, where elsewhere they might be ground (zero) and 1.
Not only them, and I’m not here to blame 😅
Indeed, however the Americans stand out in the anglosphere
Canada sad.
They always forget about us.
Which standard does Canada use?
This could be why Obiwan wound up a hermit? (Programmers of my generation at least talk about “Obiwan errors” because his name sounds like “off-by-one”.)
This would work better as Nth floor of a building
Nonbinary
Don’t wanna state the obvious, but it looks like they still ended up staring at each other for the rest of the evening.
They have shown that they still love each other, so hope they can work with their one irreconcilable difference.
I love the idea that they’re at two adjacent tables, each one staring at the other wondering why they hate them.
They hate each other because they are intolerant to one another’s index choices
I still mess this up for lists in Python…
Bullshit.
Every programmer knows that
'A'in['A', 'B', 'C', 'D']would be the 0th item; the first item is'B'1st would be ‘B’, first is ‘A’
If you want to be both wrong and confusing
If you want to use correct English and be clear don’t use ordinals: Say “index 0, index 1” etc
Save ordinals for contexts without indices: the first time through this loop, the last record"
That would be wrong in every technical sense. You’re saying that
.first()would skip the 0th item.First = leftmost.
That’s because the word “first” in
first()uses one-based indexing. In true programmer fashion it would have been calledzeroth()but that is wholly unintuitive to most humans.I maintain that the element with the lowest index is called the “zeroth” element in zero-based indexing and “first” in one-based indexing. The element with index N is the Nth element.
No, there is simply no such thing as “zeroth”, that’s not how ordinal numbers work. If I have the following numbered list:
-
Foo
-
Bar
-
Baz
The first item is “Foo” which is indexed 5. It is not the fifth item, because the item indexed 5 comes first in the list, so the item indexed 5 is the first item. Ordinal numbers don’t refer to index, they refer to order.
Foo is both the first and fifth item - Foo is the first item in that segment (or slice if you’re a weird golang programmer) but it is also the fifth item in some sir-not-appears-in-this-film list that is responsible for the odd numbering. If I said “I just finished the fifth item on our todo list” you’d mark off Foo because that’s clearly what I was referring to.
Places can have two labels (or more!) and, for bonus points, zeroth is a thing because we both know what that word means.
Okay, I will admit, you got me there. I did confuse indexing with numbering. From now on I will use the term “numbering” instead.
It is entirely how ordinal numbers work in zero-based numbering. There is no “right way” for ordinal numbers to work. You can create a valid ordinal numbering system starting from any integer, or just some other ordered list. You cannot assume one-based numbering is “correct” and use it as an argument against numbering beginning from any other number.
I encourage you read up what is meant by “zero based numbering” because you and everyone else who has replied to me has tried to use “but that’s not how it works in one-based numbering” as an explanation for why I’m wrong. This is as nonsensical of an argument as trying to say i (the imaginary unit) is not a number because it’s not on the number line. It’s only not a number in the domain of the real numbers. Similarly, zero-based numbering is only nonsensical in the context of one-based indexing.
Zero-based numbering would number “foo” as the zeroth element, “bar” as the first element, and “baz” as the second element. “zeroth”, “first”, and “second” are labels representing ordinals. Your list has a length of 3 (which is a cardinal quantity unrelated to ordinals).
Although, I would like to point out, it is perfectly valid to construct an ordinal labelling system that assigns “fifth” to the element with the lowest index, “sixth” to the next, and so on. That system is mathematically coherent but it is just troublesome to when it comes time to convert ordinal numbers (such as the index of the last fence-post) to cardinal numbers (such as the length of fence to buy).
But this is now getting into the weeds of pure mathematics and most people here are engineers.
-
Indexes start from zero because they’re memory offsets, but
array[0]is still the first element because it’s an ordinal number, not an offset. It’s literally counting each element of the array. It lines up with the cardinality—you wouldn’t say['A', 'B', 'C']has two elements, despitearray[2]being the last element.Zero-based indexing redefines the meaning of the labels “first”, “second”, “third”, and so on. It adds a new label, “zeroth”, which has the same ordinal value as “first” in one-based indexing. The word “first” does not mean “the element with the lowest index” in zero-based indexing.
If you are using a zero-based numbering system, you would absolutely say that
array[2]is the final element in the array, that element having the ordinal label “second”, and yet the length of the array is 3 (cardinal). There is no fundamental connection between the ordinal labels “zeroth”, “first”, “second”, and “third” and the cardinal numbers 0, 1, 2, and 3. The similarities are purely an artefact of human language, which is arbitrary anyway. You can make an equally mathematically valid ordinal numbering system that assigns “third” to the element with the smallest index, “fourth” to the next-smallest, and so on. That ordinal numbering system is mathematically coherent and valid, but you’re just causing trouble for yourself when it comes time to convert those ordinals (such as array indexes) into cardinals (such as memory locations or lengths of fencing to buy).You can make an argument for why one-based numbering is more convenient and easier to use, but you cannot use the notion that zero-based numbering doesn’t make sense given the assumed context of one-based numbering as an argument for why zero-based numbering is invalid.
I encourage you read up what is meant by “zero based numbering” because you and everyone else who has replied to me has tried to use “but that’s not how it works in one-based numbering” as an explanation for why I’m wrong. This is as nonsensical of an argument as trying to say i (the imaginary unit) is not a number because it’s not on the number line. It’s only not a number in the domain of the real numbers. Similarly, zero-based numbering is only nonsensical in the context of one-based indexing.
It does not matter why indexes start from zero. The memory offset argument is only salient if you are using it as an argument for why computers should use zero-based numbering.
Yeah, fair enough. To my mind I guess I don’t think of array indexes as an example of actual zero based numbering, simply a quirk of how pointers work. I don’t see why one starting from zero has anything to do with the other starting from zero. They’re separate things in my head. Interestingly, the article you linked does mention this argument:
Referencing memory by an address and an offset is represented directly in computer hardware on virtually all computer architectures, so this design detail in C makes compilation easier, at the cost of some human factors. In this context using “zeroth” as an ordinal is not strictly correct, but a widespread habit in this profession.
That said, I suppose I still use normal one-based numbering because that’s how I’m used to everything else working.
Most humans wouldd never write the word
firstfollowed by(). It absolutely should have beenzeroth(), and would not cause any confusion amongst anyone who needed to write it.It absolutely should not have been named zeroth() because the reasoning for that is purely pedantic and ignores WHY arrays are 0 indexed. It’s not like the people in the early days of writing programming languages were saying “the zeroth item in the array” - they would refer to it using human language because they are humans, not machines. Arrays are 0 indexed because it’s more efficient for address location. To get the location in memory of an array item, it’s startingAddress + (objectSize * index). If they were 1 indexed, the machine would have to reverse the offset.
Function/Method names, on the other hand, should be written so as to make the most sense to the humans reading and writing the code, because the humans are the only ones that care what the name is. When you have an array or list, it’s intuitive to think “I want the first thing in the array” or “I want the last thing in the array),” so it makes sense to use first and last. That also makes them intuitive counterparts (what would be the intuitive counterpart to “zeroth”?).My argument is purely pedantic. Pedantry is the lifeblood of programmer “humour”.
I’m not arguing that we should adopt zero-based numberingin real-life human applications. I am arguing that in zero-based numbering, the label “zeroth” refers to the same ordinal as “first” in one-based numbering. I am poking fun at the conversion between human one-based numbering and computers’ zero-based numbering. That is why I am saying it should be called
zeroth(); because human language should adapt to match the zero-based numbering their tools use. Whether I actually mean what I say—well, I leave that up to you.It does not matter why indexes start from zero in computing. The memory offset argument is only salient if you are using it as an argument for why computers should use zero-based numbering. It is not an argument against the properties of zero-based numbering itself.
Function/Method names, on the other hand, should be written so as to make the most sense to the humans reading and writing the code
Of course—that’s why we have such classics as
stristr(),strpbrk(), andstripos(). Pretty obvious what the differences are there.But to your point, the ‘intuitive’ counterpart to ‘zeroth’ is the item with index zero. What we have is a mishmash of accurate and colloquial terms for the same thing.
explode('brain', 'ai')
I’ve been a software engineer for almost 20 years now. ‘A’, at index 0*, is the first thing in the array.
* well, unless you’re using some language that actually is not zero-indexed. I think LUA is one?
That’s because you use English, a language where ordinals traditionally begin at one.
So, based on
Every programmer knows that ‘A’ in [‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’] would be the 0th item; the first item is ‘B’
You’re saying I can’t be a programmer because I speak English?
No, what I said is true if you use zero-based numbering. But when communicating with others in English, the label “first” refers to the element with the smallest index. In zero-based numbering, the label “zeroth” refers to the element with the lowest index. It’s just not the default in English, but you can definitely use zero-based numbering in English if you’re willing to edit the configuration files.
Calling index zero the first is correct, but risks misunderstandings such as in the op comic
That is why many call index zero the zeroth index
And then he texts back ‘where are you?’ And then she texts back ‘the first table’ and he replies ‘umm I’m here too. But I don’t see you’ confused she asks him ’ table 0p?’ And then ‘01*?’ He says ‘no, 00.’ Releaved she says ‘lol I am at table 01’ he chuckles ‘I am at 00, I’ll go find you’
Later they get married and have kids. But relationship collapses and it ruins both of them and they cannot find the heart to love anyone again. Their children grow up broken and struggle through life. Some get arrested end up in prison, all of them repeatedly fall into a series of toxic relationships for the rest of their lives.
username checks out
Or… or… hear me out… one of them turns around on their chair, and says “hey there”.
They were at the corner
I love how they’re looking at each other
God yes, you can clearly see from the background scene that while at different tables they can clearly see each other. All this bickering is madness
