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Let's stop counting centuries

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Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#201

Post by weinzierl »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #137
IshKebab wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the Romans had an excuse for that mistake. Not sure about Lua.

I don't think it is a mistake for Lua. The convention to zero-index arrays is not sacrosanct, it's just the way older languages did it (due to implementation details) and thus how people continue to do it. But it's very counter-intuitive, and I think it's fair game for new languages to challenge assumptions that we hold because we're used to past languages.

> "it's just the way older languages did"

It's a C family (predecessors and descendants) idiosyncrasy that very unfortunately got out of hand. Most other old languages had either 1-based indexing or were agnostic. Most notably FORTRAN, which is the language for numerical calculations is 1-based.

The seminal book Numerical Recipies was first published as 1- based for FORTRAN and Pascal and they only latter added a 0-based version for C.

Personally, coming from Pascal, I think the agnostic way is best. It is not only about 0-based or 1-based but that the type system encodes and verifies the valid range of index values, e.g. in Pascal you define an array like this:

    temperature = array [ -35 .. 60 ] of real;
You will get an immediate compule-time error if you use

   temperature[61];
At least with Turbo Pascal you could chose if you wanted run-time checks as well.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that this feature is pretty much absent from any practically used language except ADA.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#202

Post by copperx »

naniwaduni wrote: post #96
drdec wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On your sixth birthday we put a big 5 on your cake and call you a 5 year old all year. If you are going to be that pedantic, I would point out that one only has one birthday. (Well, unless one's mother is extremely unlucky.)

"Birthday" does not mean the same thing as "date of birth".

yes, birthday and birth day are different things. Just like everyday and every day have different meanings, and it isn't confusing (to most people).

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#203

Post by rdlw »

38 wrote: post #200
notfed wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this decree frustrating. Someone could have just as easily said "the 'first' century starts at 1 BC" to account for this.

Or better yet just year 0, why not? Do we say the 80s start in 1981?

The concept of zero was not popularized in 500s Europe, when the system was devised.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#204

Post by copperx »

kstrauser wrote: post #23
milliams wrote: post #11

It's easy, we should have simply started counting centuries from zero. Centuries should be zero-indexed, then everything works. We do the same with people's ages. For the entire initial year of your life you were zero years old. Likewise, from years 0-99, zero centuries had passed so we should call it the zeroth century! At least this is how I justify to my students that zero-indexing makes sense. Everyone's fought t…

We don't 0-index people's ages. There are a million books about "baby's first year", while they're still 0 years old.

Ages are zero indexed, but people avoid saying zero by counting age in months in year 0, then switch to years in year one.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#205

Post by zepolen »

tempodox wrote: post #190
gcp123 wrote: post #2

Author makes a good point. "1700s" is both more intuitive and more concise than "18th century". The very first episode of Alex Trebeck's Jeopardy in 1984 illustrates how confusing this can be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDTxS9_CwZA The "Final Jeopardy" question simply asked on what date did the 20th century begin, and all three contestants got it wrong, leading to a 3-way tie.

Logic is in short supply and off-by-one errors are everywhere. Most people don't care. I think it's more doable to learn to just live with that than to reprogram mankind.

That's what most people think and the world keeps trucking along.

It's the rare people that don't who actually change the world.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#206

Post by jcul »

kelnos wrote: post #173
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #66

> Did the American revolution happen before, during, or after the Enlightenment? I’ve no idea. When did the American revolution happen? Not everyone’s cultural frame of reference is the same as yours. I can tell you when the Synod of Whitby happened, though.

It's tiresome when people seem to think it's necessary to be annoyed that others make reference to their own cultural frame of reference in their writing. Even more tiresome when they feel the need to comment about it. Most people here, even non-Americans, likely have at least a rough idea of when the American Revolution was. And those who don't will either just gloss over it and think no more of it, or find the answ…

Also the author does give the year in the next paragraph. So no googling required.

I also didn't know what the date of the American revolution was, but I understood it was just an example.

> if you’re like me, you’ll find the question much easier to answer given the second version of the sentence, because you remember the American revolution as starting in 1776, not in the 76th year of the 18th century.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#207

Post by coldtea »

>The issue, of course, is that “counted centuries” are off by one from how we normally interact with dates—the 13th century starts in AD 1201. There’s a simple solution. Avoid saying “the 18th century”, and say “the 1700s” instead. Besides being easier to understand, it’s also slightly shorter.

The kind of person who cares and reads about "the Xth century" can also trivially understand the date range involved.

The kind of person who can't tell 18th century is the 1700s and 21st century is 2000s, it would make them little good to read history, unless they get the basics of counting, calendars, and so on down.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#208

Post by coldtea »

darby_nine wrote: post #163
burkaman wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's good, because it helps you realize that categorizing art by century is kind of arbitrary and meaningless, and if possible it would be more useful to say something like "neoclassical art from the 1700s". "18th century" isn't an artistic category, but it kind of sounds like it is if you just glance at it. "Art from the 1700s" is clearly just referring to a time period.

> I think that's good, because it helps you realize that categorizing art by century is kind of arbitrary and meaningless no it won't lol, people will pay just as much through the new dating system as they would through the old.

People pay as much for art because they are the rare combination of educated person with money which values the aesthetics and artifacts of an era, or as something to signal their wealth to others, or as a way to launder money.

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#209

Post by coldtea »

lucb1e wrote: post #123
rz2k wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about if you say "settecento"? Maybe it is a new confusion that they drop a thousand years, and maybe it would imply Italian art specifically.

Just to make sure I understood this, that would be used as "17th settecento" to mean 1700s right? (This Xth century business always bothered and genuinely confused me to no end and everyone always dismissed my objections that it's a confusing thing to say. I'm a bit surprised, but also relieved, to see this thread exists. Yes, please, kill all off-by-one century business in favor of 1700s and 17th settecento or anyth…

settecento means "700". Just proposed above as a way to say 18th century or 1700s, same as we sometimes remove the "2000" and just say "the 10s" for the decade starting 2010 (nobody cares for the 2011-as-start convention except people you don't want to talk to in the first place).

Re: Let's stop counting centuries

#210

Post by coldtea »

d0mine wrote: post #192
gcp123 wrote: post #2

Author makes a good point. "1700s" is both more intuitive and more concise than "18th century". The very first episode of Alex Trebeck's Jeopardy in 1984 illustrates how confusing this can be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDTxS9_CwZA The "Final Jeopardy" question simply asked on what date did the 20th century begin, and all three contestants got it wrong, leading to a 3-way tie.

There is no "0" year, 1 is the 1st year, so 100th year is still the 1st century, therefore 2nd century starts in 101 and 20th in 1901.

Doesn't matter, we can just agree the first century had 99 years, and be done with it.

We have special rules for leap years, that would just be a single leap-back century.

At the scale of centuries, starting 2nd century at 100 as opposed to 101 is just an 1% error, so we can live with it. For the kind of uses we use centuries for (not to do math, but to talk roughly about historical eras) it's inconsequential anyway.

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