On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 3:27 PM, Random832 <random...@fastmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Apr 1, 2016, at 19:29, Michael Selik wrote: >> Humans have always had trouble with this, in many contexts. I remember >> being annoyed at folks saying the year 2000 was the first year of the new >> millennium, rather than 2001. They'd forgotten the Gregorian calendar >> starts from AD 1. > > Naturally, this means the first millennium was only 999 years long, and > all subsequent millennia were 1000 years long. (Whereas "millennium" is > defined as the set of all years of a given era for a given integer k > where y // 1000 == k. How else would you define it?) > > And if you want to get technical, the gregorian calendar starts from > some year no earlier than 1582, depending on the country. The year > numbering system has little to do with the calendar type - your > assertion in fact regards the BC/AD year numbering system, which was > invented by Bede. > > The astronomical year-numbering system, which does contain a year zero > (and uses negative numbers rather than a reverse-numbered "BC" era), and > is incidentally used by ISO 8601, was invented by Jacques Cassini in the > 17th century. >
Are you sure? Because I'm pretty sure these folks were already talking about BC. http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/quotes/YK.html ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
