The ground floor is 0. The floor above 0 is 1. The floor below 0 is -1. Anything else is crazy TBH, the whole point of integer numbers is to count things that start at a defined point and go opposite ways. Why shift it and then reinvent weird pseudo-negative numbers like S1?
But then again people measure distance in feet and write dates as month day year :)
It would be nice if this was the case. In grad school I taught in a building that was on a hill and had once been separate buildings so different entrances were on different floor and the transition between the former separate buildings was 4 stairs.
So there was a floor with rooms numbered 1xx and 0xx. There was also a floor below the 0xx floor. They just numbered it 00xx. And you could enter the building on any of those floors depending on what door you picked.
The class I taught was in 0005. Room 005 was someone's office. So on the first day of every semester we would have students waiting outside the door of 005 instead of 0005...
Cool, Dwinelle at Berkeley is a fascinatingly bizarre building for seemingly very similar reasons, and (if I remember correctly) also with pretty much the same weird numbering system plus tiny staircases to adjust for mismatched heights between floors!
> If I build a building in the shape of a double helix, what order are the two floors in?
Why separate the floors that are on the same level?
> Hmm, are there actually an infinite number of floors?
I assumed there isn't and that we use a subset of integers. If you have infinite number of floors - feel free to use full set of integers (if you have enough memory that is).
> Do we need to switch to floating point?
No point, if you have more than aleph0 floors - floats won't help you.
We have a building at the local university that has ground at one end level with transitory step between floors -1 and 0, you enter the building through the stair well, and descend or ascend to get to a floor. I wouldn't be surprised if an architect designed a building that did this on flat ground, violating the ability to number floors relative to ground with integers.
There’s some confusion here about the exact word being used. The German word that is mistranslated here as “floor” is “Stock”, which actually means “addition”. So the floor above the ground floor is the first addition, not the “first floor”.
But then again people measure distance in feet and write dates as month day year :)