95
Did the year zero never exist ?
(lemmy.ml)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
95 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43850 readers
611 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
The language is rooted in the same logic as people. Your first year was between the ages of 0 and 1. The first year before you were born is between -1 and 0. There is no 0th year because 0 is a point in time and not a range in time.
Your explanation works equally well for any integer though. You could say the same of 1.
I think you're saying that it's a fencepost issue. But even for personal ages this doesn't check out: for a year after you are born, your age is "0." A one-year-old baby is in the following year.
I feel you've missed the point I was making and assumed I've made another. Age number and year number are different. You're in your first year when your age is not yet 1. You're in your second year when your age is between 1 and 2.
Years follow numbers as in "this year was the first/second/third year of ", not "this year was the year turned X years old"
Oh I see. Sure, historically it makes sense that years have been ordinal numbers. But in the modern era with all our math and computational knowledge, it is not convenient anymore. It means off-by-one errors are easy to commit when comparing BC and AD years.
This is why programming languages all index from 0 rather than 1 (knuth and lua be damned)