On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 4:16 AM Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 > > If they'd only used Unicode, they could have said "þou" in prayer and "ðousand" for the year. BTW, I finally know why there are all those "Ye Olde ...". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
