zeroth /zee'rohth/ adj.
First. Among software designers, comes from C's and LISP's
0-based indexing of arrays. Hardware people also tend to start
counting at 0 instead of 1; this is natural since, e.g., the 256
states of 8 bits correspond to the binary numbers 0, 1,
..., 255 and the digital devices known as
`counters' count in this way.
Hackers and computer scientists often like to call the first
chapter of a publication `Chapter 0', especially if it is of an
introductory nature (one of the classic instances was in the
First Edition of K&R). In
recent years this trait has also been observed among many pure
mathematicians (who have an independent tradition of numbering
from 0). Zero-based numbering tends to reduce fencepost errors, though it cannot
eliminate them entirely.
Node:zigamorph, Next:zip, Previous:zeroth, Up:= Z
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zigamorph /zig'*-morf/ n.
1. Hex FF (11111111) when used as a delimiter or fence character. Usage: primarily at IBM shops.
2. [proposed] n. The Unicode non-character U+FFFF
(1111111111111111), a character code which is not assigned to any
character, and so is usable as end-of-string. (Unicode is a
16-bit character code intended to cover all of the world's
writing systems, including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese,
hiragana, katakana, Devanagari, Thai, Laotian and many other
scripts - support for elvish is
planned for a future release).