In English, the day of your birth, when you're 0, is also your birthday. So, technically speaking, when you're turning 29, you're having your 30th birthday, even though no-one says it like that. I always assumed 0-based indexing was something like that, similar to the example given about the ground floor being the 0th floor in some countries and the first floor in others.
Another example is if I'm getting directions from someone, and they say, "Walk 3 blocks that way", in my mind I conceptualize that I'm presently on the 0th block and I don't yet count it.
I don't think every day people disagree with these examples so much (well, maybe the birthday one, but that's because we use the same word for the literal day as well as anniversary), and they're all fairly intuitive. I never realized that 0-based indexing required such a deep background to be justified.
> In English, the day of your birth, when you're 0, is also your birthday.
That depends on whether you think of "birthday" as synonymous with "the actual day of my birth" or "a celebration of the day of my birth". I think most of us actual consider it the latter, which is why the first one is after you've been born for a year. If you look up the definition of "birthday" (one word, no spaces) you'll see that there is often some acknowledgement of this in the differing definitions offered.
> "Walk 3 blocks that way", in my mind I conceptualize that I'm presently on the 0th block and I don't yet count it.
You have to decide whether the person is saying something is on the third block from your position, or you need to walk about three blocks of distance. You probably do this automatically based on how close you are to the edge of the current block. If I'm 30 feet from the edge of a black, I'm probably not going to include the current block in that distance. I imagine you probably won't as well.
> they're all fairly intuitive. I never realized that 0-based indexing required such a deep background to be justified.
I think they're only intuitive because we're all context sensitive. The issue is when people don't have the same context, or the context no longer strictly makes sense when the terminology is used in contexts that make less sense.
As an offset, and in programming languages where it's easy to see it's an offset (C), it makes perfect sense. In languages where that's all hidden from you, and you're really just referencing the nth item in a list, the 0th item doesn't make a lot of sense. People in these different contexts will likely have different ideas of what "intuitive" means with regards to this.
Another example is if I'm getting directions from someone, and they say, "Walk 3 blocks that way", in my mind I conceptualize that I'm presently on the 0th block and I don't yet count it.
I don't think every day people disagree with these examples so much (well, maybe the birthday one, but that's because we use the same word for the literal day as well as anniversary), and they're all fairly intuitive. I never realized that 0-based indexing required such a deep background to be justified.