[Tutor] referring to list elements

[Sean 'Shaleh' Perry]

On 12-Apr-2002 Christopher Smith wrote:
> Can someone educated in comp sci tell me whether you really refer to the
> elements of a list, when speaking, as zero-eth, one-eth, two-eth, etc...,
> as described in the How to Think book?  What do you do when you get to the
> fifth element: do you call it the four-eth element?  If you refer to them
> in the natural linguistic sense as '1st', '2nd', etc..., are you always
> doing a little mental gymnastics to remember that the index is one less
> than the actual element position in the ordinal sense?
> 
> ['1st','2nd','3rd','4th','5th'] #indices [0,1,2,3,4]
> 

I use 1st, 2nd, 3rd, ... and just remember that the first element is 0, not 1.