| From: o1bigtenor via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | (Except for the idea of 0 being an actual counter as it is in only the computing | world.) I think that you are referring to C using 0 as the subscript for the first element of an array. An interesting issue. I agree that 0 should not be an ordinal number. In grade school we called these ordinal Natural Numbers. However mathematicians usually think that 0 is a Natural number. Read the first paragraph of <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_number> Zero is a good cardinal number (for designating the size of sets). In grade school we called them Whole Numbers. Anything more inclusive has zero: integers, rationals, real, imaginary, complex, ... BUT: Any experienced programmer finds the C convention more convenient in many little ways. I think that many mathematicians number elements of sequences starting at 0. The lowest term of a polynomial in x will be the x^0 term. On the other hand, I've not seen a math matrix with a 0 row or column.