Gunnar Opheim (g...@bkkfiber.no) writes
"This is the ISO 8601 definition, made for the modern computerized world. In
the traditional proleptic calendar (both Gregorian and Julian) there was no
year 0, AD 1 followed 1 BC."
His point is wsell taken unexceptionable, and literally correct; but I should
like to add that the astronomical Julian calendar made use of the year sequence
. . . , -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, . . . at the time of its presentation by Scaliger
in 1635 and has done so ever since.
The absence of a zero in a calendar's year sequence marks it as a
traditional--in Foucault's word, epigraphic--one, adequate to dating contracts
and monuments, specifying consular or regnal intervals, recording life spans on
tombstones and the like, but radically unsuitable for computation. The
sequence of positive|unsigned integers is not closed under subtraction; the
need for zeros in computational schemes thus long antedates computers.
John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
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