Re: Military time (whoops!)

[Carl Distefano cld@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from "Patricia M. Godfrey"  Sat,
17 Jun 2006 16:18:33 -0400

> And we still count administrations and other human events from
> 1: 1776 (or 1788) is the first year of this republic, no? not
> the zeroth?

True, and that's a reminder that there's a distinction between how
you count things and how you number them. If your computer has
drive 0 and drive 1, it still has two drives, right? In fact,
"drive 0" has always struck me as a geekish affectation, because
while zero is obviously critical in logical (bitwise) operations, it
doesn't make a whole lot of sense to use it to count things.

Counting/enumeration can be a close thing. In programming, for
example, how do you evaluate the position of character "A" in string
"ABCDE"? In many languages the convention is that it's 1, whereas
in others (XPL, for example), it's 0. One method includes the "A"
in the count, the other doesn't. Or, rather, one counts characters,
the other counts positions to the left of the target character.)
Which is better? I'm of two minds about it. Or is it one mind?

> I ... think the simplest thing to do is say that the first
> century was anomalous, having only 99 years (1-99 AD), and all
> subsequent centuries run from 100-199, 200-299, and so on.

Great idea. To avoid the anomaly, 0 A.D. and 1 B.C. could be
defined as one and the same year. Who says the two eras can't
overlap? There is an ineluctable binary logic to it, to boot:
0 A.D.: Dominus=FALSE; 1 A.D.: Dominus=TRUE. Assuming, of course,
that Dominus was born in 1 A.D., which, of course, he wasn't, but
it's the thought that counts.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx