1487
Off by one solitude (fed.dyne.org)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yup. We should really zero-index century names and years AD/BC as well, but we don't. If we were still using Roman numerals it would be no big deal, but we rarely do, so there's a confusing clash. I'm not sure if it was this programming humour community or another where I had a big exchange on the topic before.

I suppose you could have some kind of positional system that's one-indexed, so 999AD = 1111999AD, and 2000 would be written 2111, but you'd have to completely redo the way arithmetic works, and that defeats the point a bit. And, the new 999 would not be our 999, because it's effectively base 9.

this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
1487 points (98.5% liked)

Programmer Humor

37051 readers
215 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS