Re: 1-based indexing in Lua or the one without zero

[Francisco Olarte <folarte@...>]

On Sun, Apr 22, 2018 at 5:43 PM, ag <aga.chatzimanikas@gmail.com> wrote:
...
> So, lets say that we could talk with a just born human child, and asked him:
>
>   how old are you?
>
> Is not one, but is not zero either. He actually is zero and an offset.

That question is not counting, is measuring. The thing is sufficiently
old people normally reply in truncated years.

The question is very similar to "how tall are you". Here we usually
reply in "fractional" meters ( i.e., "un metro ochenta", one meter
eighty, meaning 1.80 ) ( And I quote "fractional" because we normally
use m and cm, no pure fractions, like minutes and secods, so "un metro
ocho", one meter eight, usually means 1.08 ).

Anyway, what I was going to say, if you ask a mother how old his son
is, normally she would use an appropiate unit, and tell you something
like three days, four weeks, seven ( or seventeen ) months, and only
switch to years when she knows the precision loss does not matter.

If you ask her "how many years does your son have", you could easily
get none ( or none, just 10 months ). This is counting. And yes, you
usually start at one like "in the babys first year ...."

Francisco Olarte.