On 18/12/2016 22:21, BartC wrote:
On 18/12/2016 21:04, Michael Torrie wrote:
On 12/18/2016 09:21 AM, BartC wrote:
So if you wanted a simple list giving the titles of the chapters in a
book or on a DVD, on the colour of the front doors for each house in a
street, usually you wouldn't be able to use element 0.
It also depends on whether you want to number the spaces between the
objects or the objects themselves. To use your DVD example, the first
chapter will probably be starting at time zero, not time one.
In another example, babies start out at "zero" years old not "one." But
at the same time we refer the first year of life. Maybe it's not a
phrase much used these days but it used to be common to say something
like "in my 15th year," meaning when I was 14. Maybe a more common use
would be "the first year of my employment at this company."
There's the fence analogy (perhaps similar to what alister said):
You have a fence made up of one-metre-wide panels that fit between two
posts.
For a 10-metre fence, you need 11 posts, and 10 panels.
The posts can conveniently be numbered from 0 to 11,
... 0 to 10.
That's the thing with zero-based; it might reduce some off-by-one errors
but could introduce others.
With the panels you have 10 panels numbered 1 to 10; what could be
simpler or more intuitive?
--
Bartc
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