Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Peter Pearson Newsgroups: comp.lang.python Subject: Re: Python handles globals badly. Date: 10 Sep 2015 20:49:28 GMT Lines: 31 Message-ID: References: <86fa425b-d660-45ba-b0f7-3beebdec8e14@googlegroups.com> <55EE9EEC.1060907@rece.vub.ac.be> <55ef0514$0$1655$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> <55efa62d$0$1653$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> <55f06ae1$0$1650$c3e8da3$5496439d@news.astraweb.com> <3435A80B-14B9-4A7C-99D5-06D898297839@mac.com> X-Trace: individual.net 8GWiy8q/dc18VlM28PkO8wDh+vxBKC/SfTm6xYAwnHp2IaSLIV Cancel-Lock: sha1:tVBCeBKYDxxxJvvb0HZexpUvxJg= User-Agent: slrn/pre1.0.0-18 (Linux) Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:96304 On Wed, 9 Sep 2015 20:20:42 +0100, Mark Lawrence wrote: > On 09/09/2015 18:59, William Ray Wing wrote: >>> On Sep 9, 2015, at 1:22 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote: [snip] >> Right. Note that the Arabs, who DID invent zero, still count from one. [snip] > Would you please provide a citation to support your claim as this > http://www.livescience.com/27853-who-invented-zero.html disagrees. That's baffling. Livescience.com says this: Robert Kaplan, author of "The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero," suggests that an ancestor to the placeholder zero may have been a pair of angled wedges used to represent an empty number column. However, Charles Seife, author of "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea," disagrees that the wedges represented a placeholder. In that exact book, Seife says the exact opposite of the above allegation: Zero was the solution to the problem. By around 300 BC the Babylonians had started using two slanted wedges, [graphics omitted], to represent an empty space, an empty column on the abacus. This _placeholder_ [italics in original] mark made it easy to tell which position a symbol was in. Either Seife completely changed his mind after my copy of his book was published (2000), or Livescience.com got it completely wrong. -- To email me, substitute nowhere->runbox, invalid->com.