Comments on: Starting from zero

By: lino

lino — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:24:25 +0000

Herbert
10 to the power of 0 equates to 1 and not to 0. Be careful with your maths.

By: Gianni Xuereb

Gianni Xuereb — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:34:53 +0000

In reply to m@.

@Pat: I wasn’t basing my argument on programming, but on Gregorian calendars and Astronomical calendars.

In fact I said Daphne is right in saying year 0 does not exist if we were to stick to the Gregorian calendar. But she is absolutely wrong in saying that 0 is not a number and that you should always start counting from 1.

m@: Sorry my mistake I didn’t specify the language I was referring to (C#)… I mentioned programming just to give an example. I just didn’t want to go into technicalities, comparing an array of 60 to the number of seconds in one minute. The 60th second simply does not exist in 1 minute. The 60th second would be the starting point of the next minute. I hardly ever use arrays anyway…. I’m more into lambda expressions, dynamic programming etc.

Quoting from one of the hundreds of books:
“VB 6 programmers take note: in C#, the value of the size of the array marks the number of elements in the array, not the upper bound. In fact, there is no way to set the upper or lower bound—with the exception that you can set the lower bounds in multidimensional arrays , but even that is not supported by the .NET Framework class library. Thus, the first element in an array is 0. The following C# statement declares an array of 10 elements, with indexes 0 through 9:
string myArray[10];
The upper bound is 9, not 10, and you can’t change the size of the array (i.e., there is no equivalent to the VB 6 Redim function).”

By: Harry Purdie

Harry Purdie — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:11:12 +0000

In reply to Mark C. Markie, your opinion or have you been googling again?

By: Andrea

Andrea — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 18:45:11 +0000

In reply to Andrea. Gianni, you must be a hell of a mind-boggling customer at the greengrocer's.

By: Mark C

Mark C — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 23:49:07 +0000

I think all of you are confusing matters when you apply maths, the calender system and programming together. They all have their own system. All of them have their own flaws. Programming return with a divide by zero error where maths accomplishes an answer. The calender is just an estimation if one is to bear in mind that jesus was born on the 25th on not on the 1st of January and there are many counter claims to the date. Also the calendar and current date system is inaccurate and every few hundred years this has to be fixed. that is why we have the leap year to re-synch the timing. Even maths has its own parodoxes and flaws. That is my opinion, ps Daphne thanks for correcting my spelling mistakes.

By: Herbert

Herbert — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:29:51 +0000

In reply to Herbert.

sorry forgot to tell you that’s because decimal works on 10 power 0, 10 power 1, 10 power 2 which equate to 0, 10, 100, etc…

if you want serieses ending in 9 use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonary

By: Herbert

Herbert — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:25:46 +0000

Daphne I know this post is old but doctor Muscat is right.

Easy explanation come from the fact that 0-9, than 10 (extra digit) 10-99 then 100 etc… 0 is always at the start of a series

An when you count to 10 euros, you start at 1 because the nought is already there. Ten euros please? (The zero has already been received) so you start at 1.

Hope this explanation makes you a better mathematician, cause you’re currently very poor at it from what I can read.

By: m@

m@ — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:52:36 +0000

In reply to Gianni Xuereb.

Programmers do not start counting from zero, it’s just that some wrongly think that indexing and counting are the same thing.

Gianni, there’s no such thing as the 0th element of an array, there’s the 1st. Indexing the 1st element as 0 is just some referencing convention(which has it’s uses). You can call it anything else you want, like ‘a’, ‘100’, or ‘donkey’ to the same effect; it’s always going to be the 1st countable element of the array.

By: Simon Gills

Simon Gills — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:47:48 +0000

Of course there can be a year 0. Just because you are good with numbers, it certainly doesn’t mean you know anything about mathematics as you have proved again and again in this thread. You may very well be right about the fact that the first year was year 1(this subject doesn’t particularly interest me) but it’s definitely not down to mathematical reasoning. Measuring anything starts from zero, but this doesn’t mean that until you reach 1 full measure, we have “nought”. That’s why the decimal system has a decimal point and that is why time is also measured in days, hours, minutes, seconds, and so on. You have been flaming people and Madonna santa Gesu hanin, you are completely wrong……fact.

By: Mat Deplume

Mat Deplume — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 12:21:31 +0000

Firstly a new decade stars whenever you want it to… so probably this is the reason for so much disagreement…..

Secondly the 2010s have already started. Wikipedia and the bbc all consider 01/2010 the start of the twenty-tens…..

In general, i think this article is trying a bit too hard to pick on JM…. (Ps I am not his supporter .. even thinking about it nauseates me).

Not to talk about the “sounding like sour grapes”, taken of the back of the cornflakes box, comment about PHDs. This comment really bothers me because it shows your poor knowledge of what is involved in obtaining a PHD.

It would have been more appropriate to comment about how certain MPs obtained their MBAs……

Still find it strange you find so little wrong with the current administration and find it more appropriate to waste time throwing sh*t at at a sh*t magnet.