A glitch in February of the year 0

(28times.com)

15 points | by lukasgelbmann 3 days ago ago

8 comments

  • stymaar 2 hours ago

    The glitch starts with the existence of “year 0”: there's no such thing in the Christian calendars, it goes straight from 1BC to 1AD. (Zero didn't even exist in the 6th century when the Anno Domini epoch was set).

    • quink an hour ago

      They acknowledge that in the article, and make it clear that it really refers to 1 BC.

    • astrobe_ an hour ago

      And that's also why we are in the 21st century, not the 20th.

      • stymaar an hour ago

        Arr[0] is the first element of an array, not the “zeroth”.

        • Perenti an hour ago

          In a zero based array type language. In pascal I believe arrays can start where you want them to as in "array[-10..10] of integer". It's been a while though.

          There is no year zero. Trying to compute with one is almost certainly an error. Trying to work with it is like dividing by zero - it does not make sense.

          The year "1" was originally a Julian Date. Using a Gregorian Date before the calendar was introduced is almost certainly an error.

          For ancient things, use Before Present, where I believe Present is defined to be sometime in 1950 or there about. For "modern" things (varying definitions of modern) use a sensible format/calendar that works in your database.

        • keyle an hour ago

          But Arr could be empty or uninitialised...

    • samlinnfer an hour ago

      They're just using astronomical year numbering.

  • XYen0n an hour ago

    > The first century starts at 0001-01-01 00:00:00 AD, although they did not know it at the time. This definition applies to all Gregorian calendar countries. There is no century number 0, you go from -1 century to 1 century. If you disagree with this, please write your complaint to: Pope, Cathedral Saint-Peter of Roma, Vatican.

    https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/functions-datetime.html#...