• stingpie@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Cardinal refers to number, while ordinal refers to sequence. Both American & British systems are ordinal, since changing the order of the floor numbers would make no sense. If they were cardinal, the order would be irrelevant.

    Personally, I prefer the American system, since the bottom floor is what you enter on, and is therefore the first floor you interact with.

    • acargitz@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      You’re wrong about that, cardinal numbers are still ordered. You can’t have Charles the Third come before Charles the Second (but there is no Charles the Zeroth).

      • stingpie@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Cardinal numbers refer to the size of a set. (10 apples in a basket) Ordinal numbers refer to the order of elements in a set (third apple put into the basket) you can rearrange an ordered set and retain the same cardinality (ten apples in the basket) but you’d change the order of the elements (switch the third and sixth apple).

        The floor number you’re on is an ordinal number. You can rearrange the elements while retaining the cardinality of the set, (the total number of floors does not change) but the order of the set is changed (the third floor is switched with the sixth floor).

        Hope that clears up the confusion. Have a nice day.

      • Arcity 🇵🇸🇺🇦@feddit.nl
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        2 months ago

        It depends on the convention whether enumerating starts with the zeroth or first. In programming for example indices commonly start at zero. And the numbering of floors is another example of where starting at zero is quite common.

      • Arcity 🇵🇸🇺🇦@feddit.nl
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        2 months ago

        Cardinal numerals refer to amount (one, two, three) and ordinal refers to a position in a sequence (first, second, third). So your example is ordinal not cardinal.