[LEAPSECS] LEAPSECS Digest, Vol 88, Issue 31

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <OF8E203EEC.858D9F51-ON85257C60.008191BF-85257C60.0081B23E at mck.us.ra
y.com>, Joseph M Gwinn writes:


>The problem was religious - nobody was going to have Christ born in the

>year zero.


Actually, that was not really the issue, the issue was that they
didn't have negative numbers at that time and therefore also
didn't realize that "nothing" was a number.

Negative numbers only came into acceptance during the heydays of
the Venetian trade, where somebody, can't remember the name, argued
that "we need negative numbers for this, because he owes more than
he owns." or words to similar effect.

At the time the "Anno Domini" convention was put into tradition,
it would only make sense for them to talk about the year before and
the year after.  Nobody would have any reason to put a zero in there,

If they had tried to do so, it would give no meaning to them, because
"year zero" would literally mean "no year" or "year of nothing".

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.