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From: Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
Subject: Re: [beginner] What's wrong?
Date: Sat, 02 Apr 2016 12:31:45 -0400
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On Sat, 2 Apr 2016 19:15:36 +1100, Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
declaimed the following:

>On Sat, Apr 2, 2016 at 3:27 PM, Random832 <random832@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.

	Bede's BC/AD goes back to circa 700AD. It is the use of negative years
for astronomical counting that is circa 1650AD
>
>http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/holybook/quotes/YK.html

	And that I'll take as something suited for the first of April... It's
almost on par with an old story (in Asimov's I think) on why the pyramids
were behind schedule -- among other things, the pile of government mandated
documentation, on clay tablets of course, was becoming larger than the
pyramid being built; the older records (on the bottom of the stack) were
decomposing from the pressure, etc. If I recall, they discover cuneiform as
more condense than hieroglyphics, and then learn of papyrus/ink (but then
have to support an entire industry of workers to transcribe the old clay
tablets...)


-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/