this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
98 points (93.8% liked)

Asklemmy

43397 readers
1152 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Please explain my confused me like I'm 5 (0r 4 or 6).

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I feel you've missed the point I was making and assumed I've made another. Age number and year number are different. You're in your first year when your age is not yet 1. You're in your second year when your age is between 1 and 2.

Years follow numbers as in "this year was the first/second/third year of ", not "this year was the year turned X years old"

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Oh I see. Sure, historically it makes sense that years have been ordinal numbers. But in the modern era with all our math and computational knowledge, it is not convenient anymore. It means off-by-one errors are easy to commit when comparing BC and AD years.

This is why programming languages all index from 0 rather than 1 (knuth and lua be damned)