It causes problems for people with a CS background too. I once numbered machines in racks with zero-indexing (so that they could match up with zero-indexed ip addresses). Even though literally everyone who touched those machines had CS background: DO NOT DO THIS.

It just amuses me that one of the big differences between the US and EU is which floor is "first" and which one is "zero" or "minus one".

Yes. A German friend of mine moved into her student dormitory in the US, and when she was told that her room was on the first floor, asked whether there was a lift, because she had a heavy suitcase...

Having said that, given that there are basements (in Europe, at least), it makes sense to call the ground floor 0. We are dealing with integers here, not natural numbers.

But floors of multi-storey buildings are a pretty unique exception in the real world in having a characteristic where zero -- the number of stairs you need to climb from the ground floor -- has an actual tangible meaning (on the ground floor).

How many other such examples can you (editorial you; anyone) come up with? Not many, I'd bet.

I thought you'd be wrong, and immediately came up with:

- Hours after midnight. The (non-anglosaxon) watch goes from 0:00 to 24:00 (the latter is useful for deadlines: The proposal must be submitted by Friday, 24:00 (which coincides with Saturday, 0:00)).

Then I cheated and looked up Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-based_numbering#Other_fie... ) - and whoops, that's basically it!

Yeah, duh, totally forgot that one.

And I should know; the alarm clock on my windowsill says 0:54 right now.

Year -- or rather, decade, century, and millennium -- numbering. We're only in the second year of the second decade of the twenty-first century, so the decade will end and the next start at the end, not the beginning, of 2030.

But this is perhaps more of a problem with numbers and zeroes, and ends and beginnings; people don't get that 10 is the last of the 00s, not the first of the 10s. The very first year was numbered 1, not 0, so that's not the problem. Or, it kind of is: People would be right, if the first year had been 0.