Stopwatches and odometers can also be used to label time intervals to associate them to events occurring in those intervals and keep track of the order in which they take place. In fact, conceptual odometers counting days have been used at least for two millennia and detecting a day when a big cycle ends and the day when the next begins is extremely hard to miss.
In addition, by starting at 0 when labelling sequential objects the offset from the anchor is immediately evident; for instance, if the buttons in an elevator for the floors of the building are labelled: *G (0), 1 ,2, ... and I pressed 6, to get to the floor where I am then I know that if a fire alarm goes off I will go down the stairs 6 floors and I will be on the ground floor. However, if the fire alarm would go off right now in my building, ... I would do nothing because there are too many damn false alarms! In the context of the common English language, there is little doubt that the ordinal numbers are 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, ... However, in another context (see, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number ) they are 0, 1, 2, ... (, ω, and so on). Personally, I have no problem relating both by saying 0 is the 1st ordinal number, 1 is the 2nd ordinal, 2 is the 3rd ordinal, 3 is the 4th ordinal, etc. I understand that there could be instances where starting from 1 might be more desirable; apparently, that is the case for your Ordinal Fractions where the digit 0 is used for a special purpose (although I cannot see the difficulty in starting from 0 and using, say, _ for the special purpose). On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 5:52 PM, Jose Mario Quintana < [email protected]> wrote: > :D > > It seems that these people like complications. They are not very smart or > maybe they are... Job security! > > > On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 7:14 PM, David Lambert <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> Our credit union had used employee numbers for account numbers. But ran >> out of 5 digit numbers. Did they change our accounts to 0abcde? No! >> They >> multiplied 10 leaving us as abcde0. >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
