Dan Lewis wrote:
Remember that numbers were originally used only to count. And when we count a group of things, we begin with the number 1 not 0. The concepts of BC and AD as well as CE (now) were based upon the Roman calendar. Since 0 did (and does) not exist in the Roman numeral system, neither can a year be designated by 0. The whole concept of the number 0 came much later.
No, the ancient Greeks and Romans were quite aware of the result of subtracting one from one. The lack of a zero digit in the representation of numbers has nothing to do with that.
The problem is that the notion of a "zeroth" year (or Law of Robotics, or element in an array) is /very/ modern. The word "zeroth", itself, is only about 110 years old. Note how early programming languages start indexing arrays at 1, despite the obvious fact that it is simpler computationally to start at zero.
Indeed, counting years on an absolute scale was in itself a hard thing to conceptualize. Nearly all Roman records are dated "The year when X and Y were the consuls." They /had/ A.U.C. dates (counting from the legendary foundation of Rome in 753 B.C. -- 753 B.C. being 1 A.U.C.), but they didn't normally use them. Even today, a law in England will be dated "in the 55th year of the reign of Elizabeth II"), and in the USA, correspondingly, "in the 232nd year of the Independence of the United States".
-- John W. Kennedy "The blind rulers of Logres Nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue." -- Charles Williams. "Taliessin through Logres: Prelude" --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
