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From: Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy@yahoo.co.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
Subject: Re: [beginner] What's wrong?
Date: Sun, 3 Apr 2016 00:58:58 +0100
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On 02/04/2016 17:31, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> 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...)
>
>

Here we go again, yet another completely useless thread that is 
irrelevant to the Python programming language.  Hardly surprising that 
the bots don't bother any more.  Are any of the bots still alive?

-- 
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence