|
Like those two quarreling Arab mathematicians, and one says to the other: "Ok, ok! So you invented a zero, fine! What did you gain from that? Nothing!"
|
|
|
|
|
Minor nit-pick - the "Arabic" numerals were invented by the Indians in the 6th or 7th century and introduced to Europe by the Arabs in the 12th century, hence their name.
Hindu-Arabic numerals | History & Facts | Britannica
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
|
|
|
|
|
And the Mayans also had a zero.
|
|
|
|
|
Minor problem: If I, next time I tell that joke, replace 'Arabic' with 'Indian', no listener will get the joke, and I have to explain: "I am sorry, but to be historically correct, I had to replace the nationality of the mathematicians. So, to understand my joke, you would have to replace 'Indian' with 'Arabic. Are you laughing now?"
|
|
|
|
|
The article mentions 0-indexed languages and 1-indexed languages. The only other good number is ∞, so we need a language that starts indices there.
|
|
|
|
|
... or go the Pascal way (probably inherited from Algol and who know what before that)
"Array indexes may be any scalar type except real", so bools and enums work too!
years_so_far = array [-14000000000..2022] of <something>; (assuming a 34 bit or bigger int)
Something I missed doing scientific stuff in C++ a couple of decades ago.
Cheers,
Peter
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
|
|
|
|
|
Peter_in_2780 wrote: years_so_far = array [-14000000000..2022] of <something>; (assuming a 34 bit or bigger int)
Unfortunately, this may give incorrect results with the common Western calendar. Remember that year -1 is immediately followed by year (+)1 - there is no "year 0" between them.
I am not joking - see Year zero - Wikipedia[^]. As the Wikipedia article tells, this anomality have lead astronomers to make their own calendar, which indeed has a "year zero".
That said, I really miss the Pascal range index mechanism, and also that enums are a proper type, not just integer names, so that given an enum type 'month', an array could from index April to September. (Important note: That is neither identical to 4:9 or 3:8 - you cannot index the array by integers, no more than by doubles!)
|
|
|
|
|
Other sources of error would be:
Leap years:
- The Julian calendar originally had a leap year every 3 years, which was corrected to 4 later on
- The Gregorian century years are not leap years, unless the year is divisible by 400
Missing or extra days:
- Julius Caesar's "Year of Confusion", when 3 intercalary months were added in order to align the year with the seasons
- Differing dates of adoption of the Gregorian calendar - between 10-13 days removed from the calendar
- Transitions back to the Julian calendar - between 10-13 days added to the calendar
Differing starts to the year:
Differing starts to the day:
- Midnight (most people)
- Noon (astronomers - fallen out of usage in industrial times)
I leave out any issues that would affect the time.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
|
|
|
|
|
Certainly, and there are other issues that you didn't mention. But almost all of them relate to switching between different calendars. Missing year 0 is an issue arising even within the single calendar that we use today, e.g. when we refer to historical persons born before (the non-existing) year 0.
Side remark: I was working on a large project for Korean customers. During an informal break, one of them was asked his age, and he had think for a little while before answering. Afterwards, he explained that in his culture, they use a moon, not sun, based calendar so the year is not 365.24 days; 'his' number of years must be scaled down somewhat (he didn't tell the exact factor). Additionally, the custom is to tell which year you are in: A newborn baby is one, in his first year; age is 1-based. After twelve (lunar) months, the baby turns two when entering its second year. That must also be calculated in - and note that the one year you must subtract is a moon year, not a 'Western' year. That is why it took him a few seconds to answer, and why he said that he was 'approximately' forty-three; he couldn't do the exact scaling in his head.
|
|
|
|
|
But do you start with aleph-0 or aleph-1? 
Aleph number - Wikipedia[^]
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
|
|
|
|
|
It depends on whether the array supports ICountable. 
|
|
|
|
|
Based on this article, only Kenneth Iverson (APL), who was a mathematician turned computer scientist, really understood why both 1 and 0 based array index starts made sense. I learned CLU in college and from experience arbitrary array starting indexes are generally hard to keep straight unless you're modelling something such as temperature where the scale for liquid water could go from 32 to 212, but CLU had to do some serious behind the scenes work to ensure the indexes were properly handled.
|
|
|
|
|
I wanted to clarify the tech work landscape for myself and instead I wrote this I truly want the full term for "those who have tamed the black smoke mirrors" to put on my resume and mess with the AI's.
|
|
|
|
|
Don’t hate the technology, hate the implementation. Yea? Try unsubscribing from Bed Bath and Beyond emails.
|
|
|
|
|
That idiot at Wired has no clue to the underlying problem with SPAM and UCE emails. The bottom line is email doesn't cost anything, so every scammer and marketer (is this redundant?) blasts email out like crazy.
|
|
|
|
|
After rolling out its Email Protection service in private beta last year, DuckDuckGo has announced that it’s finally available to all users. Email Protection is a forwarding service that assigns you a free “@duck.com” email address and intercepts email trackers before they hit your personal inbox. You know this is exactly how I felt when I made my gmail account.
|
|
|
|
|
Meta is trying to make it easier for its users to get support when their accounts or posts are removed, according to a report from Bloomberg. Good because I have eighteen years worth of complaining to do.
|
|
|
|
|
If it is as good as the division for windows updates in Microsoft... 
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
|
|
|
|
|
Given that the users of a free service are the product, I wonder who their customer service division will cater to.
|
|
|
|
|
Stay up to date with the latest in the Musk-Twitter saga The rest of the world had Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. We have this.
|
|
|
|
|
I'm not sure I have enough 🍿
|
|
|
|
|
It’s become the second programming language everyone needs to know One day it will be important!
|
|
|
|
|
Kent Sharkey wrote: One day it will be important!
The NoSQL and GraphQL folks hope that "will be" is "was." 
|
|
|
|
|
"based on job postings"
🤔 because a database is used somewhere in the development stack of the company, but does not mean you will even touch, or write an query more difficult then a select statement maybe once a year.
our company job posting has SQL listed, now I release level of language proficiency is also important, especially if IEEE using them in popularity.
|
|
|
|
|
This tells me that companies have figured out that the NoSQL (and variants) have serious limits that relational databases don't share. Also, MS SQL Server now supports many of the the more common NoSQL features and I suspect Oracle and DB2 do as well, which pulls these into the SQL language world.
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
