In message <of8e203eec.858d9f51-on85257c60.008191bf-85257c60.0081b...@mck.us.ra y.com>, Joseph M Gwinn writes:
>The problem was religious - nobody was going to have Christ born in the >year zero. Actually, that was not really the issue, the issue was that they didn't have negative numbers at that time and therefore also didn't realize that "nothing" was a number. Negative numbers only came into acceptance during the heydays of the Venetian trade, where somebody, can't remember the name, argued that "we need negative numbers for this, because he owes more than he owns." or words to similar effect. At the time the "Anno Domini" convention was put into tradition, it would only make sense for them to talk about the year before and the year after. Nobody would have any reason to put a zero in there, If they had tried to do so, it would give no meaning to them, because "year zero" would literally mean "no year" or "year of nothing". -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [email protected] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
