On Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:58:47 -0700, Lie wrote: > On Apr 1, 7:06 pm, Steven D'Aprano > <ste...@remove.this.cybersource.com.au> wrote: > >> There is a major clash between the names of ordinals in human languages >> and zero-based counting. In human languages, the Nth-ordinal item comes >> in position N. You can keep that useful convention with zero-based >> counting by inventing the ugly word "zeroth", but that just leads to >> bizarro-talk like "the zeroeth item comes first, the first item comes >> second, and so on". > > No, there won't be any bizarro-talk. There is no argument: the zeroeth > item comes zeroeth, the first item comes first, and so on. The index for > the very zeroeth thing in a list is 0, so to get the zeroeth item you > use s[0]. While to get the first item you use s[1]. It's very intuitive, > isn't it?
No, because "first", "second", "third" etc. have existed in the English language for hundreds of years and everybody knows them. "Zeroeth" was probably invented a few decades ago, and is known by maybe 1% of the English-speaking population. Given the list [a, b, c], if you ask even a C programmer *in English* "what's the first item?", they will almost invariably answer a rather than b. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
