Talk:Zeroth
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[edit] Alternative terms
Apart from being horrible English, aren't there already alternatives? Isn't "nought" used in this way? --MacRusgail 14:48, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
- "The nought element, the first element, the second element"... ? No, I don't think it is. Zeroth is a term which fills a need in math and computer science, as silly as it may sound to those who aren't in those fields. --FOo 17:39, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Irrelevant examples
I would say that at least half of the examples in the "Other than computing" section are irrelevant. That an item merely is identified by the number zero doesn't automatically mean that people refer to it as the zeroth item. 00:00:00 is the moment when the 24th hour ends and the 1st begins, but it is certainly not in any sense belonging to a "zeroth hour". And I'm fairly certain that nobody in Uppsala or Cardiff ever talks about the zeroth track, only about track zero. Such a factoid could be relevant in an article about zero, but not in an article about zeroth.
And even those examples that might be relevant should really be sourced. The zeroth floor? Bruckner's zeroth (or even double-zeroth) symphony? Does someone say this? Are there reliable sources? This article is not merely about things labeled with the number zero. -- Jao 12:37, 23 August 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Zero based indexing
It's common to use zero as the starting point for measurements of continous quantities. This makes it easier to scale. This also holds for the discrete case, but isn't mentioned here. I'm not sure how to work it in though. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.106.62.45 (talk) 06:07, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Overall the article needs to be rewritten...
...however by someone who isn't up at 4 AM. All the comments are good, also the reference to http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html should be dropped, it adds nothing.
This topic is worth keeping, however. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 139.76.224.66 (talk) 10:17, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Ground floor
In the article it says: "Some buildings in the British English speaking world refer to the ground floor as floor 0". This is also the case in other countries in Europe. Could somebody that knows more about this specify where in the world counting floors starts at zero? 87.212.160.173 (talk) 16:19, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
[edit] The first is still the first
A comment above addresses the "other than computing" section. The "In computer programming" section has a similar problem.
The first item of a Pascal array declared var a : array [1..100] of integer has an index of 1. The first item of a Pascal array declared var b : array [-10..+10] of real has an index of -10. The first item of a Pascal array declared var c : array [red..blue] of 0..255 has an index of red. Who could disagree? Likewise, the first item of an array in C or Java, has an index of 0. Arrays don't need or have a zeroth item. That's not to say that no one in computing uses the word "zeroth" to mean the initial item of an array or list, but it is unnecessary and confusing when they do. It's even more confusing when they say "first" but mean "second", etc. Many computer scientists and programmers would never use this jargon. I would suggest that the use of "zeroth" in computing be flagged as "nonstandard".
The first chapter of a book might have a number of 0, or it might have no number at all, as is common in fiction. (Picking a novel off the self at random to verify this, I was surprised to find the chapter nearest the front was titled "1967". I don't think it was the 1,967th chapter.) If I don't put page numbers on the pages of an article, the first page is still the first page; if I renumber the pages so that the first page is labeled "1" or "i" or "0", it's still the first page.
The problem with the article is that it confuses labels with adjectives. The words "first," "second," etc are adjectives that indicate a position. The labels "0", "1", etc are labels. As an analogy, a dog might be named Blue or it might be coloured blue. It would be wrong to call a dog named Blue "the blue dog" unless the dog really was coloured blue. A lot of the article talks about sequences whose first item is labeled "0", this is interesting but not relevant to the topic.
I think the word "zeroth" has a few uses in math and computing. Here's one: It's well known that a quadradic is a second degree polynominal, so a constant is a zeroth degree polynomial -- although you could call it "a polynomial of degree zero". Similarly it might make sense to talk about a zeroth order approximation, when it is well understood what a first order approximation is -- although you could always say "an approximation of order zero".
142.162.207.60 (talk) 12:17, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
