alt Hacker NewsNot really. 0-based indexing is different from counting and starting with 0 in a counting context is weird. Would you ever say a set has zero elements when it actually contains a single element?
Not really. 0-based indexing is different from counting and starting with 0 in a counting context is weird. Would you ever say a set has zero elements when it actually contains a single element?
It's a remarkable coincidence that I'm reading the book The Nothing that Is: A Natural History of Zero by Robert Kaplan, and this passage on page 96 seems precisely relevant to this situation:
"""A Roman idiosyncrasy about counting reinforced this avoidance. The 360 degrees of longitude, for example, were always measured from the vernal equinox, which lies in the zodiacal sign of Aries. This should be zero degrees, 0°. It was common, however, to call it instead 'the first degree', Aries 1°, as Pliny did around 60 AD, upsetting his calculations and those of many who followed him. It amounts to this: if you lay out four marks on the ground and step from the first to the last, have you taken three paces or four? Clearly three; yet four marks were involved. To get the right answer it helps to call the starting-line 'zero'; then the number at the mark you step on will correspond to the number of your steps. But the Romans counted so that three days after Sunday was Tuesday; the Italian for the fifteenth century is the quattrocento — and all of us still call the two steps in music from C to E a major third, taking the number from the three tones involved."""
I wouldn't say that the set that has one element, labeled 0, _has_ zero elements; it has one element with the label 0. Right?