What standards would you change?
George W. Harris
:Assume access to a non-paradoxical time travel machine.
:
:You might want to go back to a point where you can substitute
:something logical for what actually came into widespread use (after
:you become obscenely wealthy, of course).
:
:I've heard EEs saying it should have been a 200V@200cps electrical
:grid, others want all books bound at the top rather than on the side,
:and I doubt that few people would object to introducing the metric
:system 2000 years ago.
:
:Personally, I'd have made it a ten hour day, with ten waits in an
:hour, ten minutes in a wait, ten moments in a minute, ten seconds in a
:moment, etc.
:
:
:What would you change and why?
Push-button phones are laid out like this:
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9
* 0 #
while calculators are laid out like this:
7 8 9
4 5 6
1 2 3
{whatever}.
I'd make them the same.
Trivial, I know.
--
"The truths of mathematics describe a bright and clear universe,
exquisite and beautiful in its structure, in comparison with
which the physical world is turbid and confused."
-Eulogy for G.H.Hardy
George W. Harris For actual email address, replace each 'u' with an 'i'
Ben Bradley
>Assume access to a non-paradoxical time travel machine.
>
>You might want to go back to a point where you can substitute
>something logical for what actually came into widespread use (after
>you become obscenely wealthy, of course).
>
>I've heard EEs saying it should have been a 200V@200cps electrical
>grid,
Well, there was/is the RS232 "standard" with all the various
combinations of baud, word length, parity, hardware or software flow
control, that actually make it dozens, if not hundreds or thousands,
or "standards." Then I'd make one of those "standards" compatible with
NIDI's baud of 32,768. Dunno how to actually fix it, though, all those
features were actually needed way back in the days of 75 and 110 baud
TTY's and modems.
>others want all books bound at the top rather than on the side,
>and I doubt that few people would object to introducing the metric
>system 2000 years ago.
>
>Personally, I'd have made it a ten hour day, with ten waits in an
>hour, ten minutes in a wait, ten moments in a minute, ten seconds in a
>moment, etc.
>
>
>What would you change and why?
DJensen
> Assume access to a non-paradoxical time travel machine.
>
> You might want to go back to a point where you can substitute
> something logical for what actually came into widespread use (after
> you become obscenely wealthy, of course).
>
> I've heard EEs saying it should have been a 200V@200cps electrical
> grid, others want all books bound at the top rather than on the side,
> and I doubt that few people would object to introducing the metric
> system 2000 years ago.
>
> Personally, I'd have made it a ten hour day, with ten waits in an
> hour, ten minutes in a wait, ten moments in a minute, ten seconds in a
> moment, etc.
>
> What would you change and why?
I'd want the [modern, western] calendar fixed, for sure: 10
months of 36 days (six weeks of six days each), plus an
intercalary week of 5 (6 with a leap day) at the end/start of
each year[1] -- which would be set around one of the equinoxes.
Circles of 100 degrees rather than 360 (which is related to the
calendar but doesn't need to be). This could give us something
like base-10 time too, in a roundabout way.
I'm sure there's all sorts of things that could be done in the
areas of city planning and mass transit... maybe divorcing the
width of train tracks from the width of two horses pulling a
cart? We've been passing that along since the Roman Empire.
[1] I -think- ancient Egypt arrived at a calendar like this at
some point, but it fell out of use as the Babylonian calendar
spread west.
--
DJensen
Derek Lyons
>I'd want the [modern, western] calendar fixed, for sure: 10
>months of 36 days (six weeks of six days each), plus an
>intercalary week of 5 (6 with a leap day) at the end/start of
>each year[1] -- which would be set around one of the equinoxes.
>
>some point, but it fell out of use as the Babylonian calendar
>spread west.
Why? Other than for financial calculations such 'evenness' provides
not real practical benefit.
>I'm sure there's all sorts of things that could be done in the
>areas of city planning and mass transit... maybe divorcing the
>width of train tracks from the width of two horses pulling a
>cart? We've been passing that along since the Roman Empire.
No. That's been passing around since the begining of the internet.
D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.
Aaron Bergman
DJensen <m...@no-spam-thanks.net> wrote:
> Circles of 100 degrees rather than 360 (which is related to the
> calendar but doesn't need to be). This could give us something
> like base-10 time too, in a roundabout way.
Ugh. 100 has too few factors. 360's got tons.
You could use gradians (IIRC). 400 grad == 360 deg.
Aaron
LukeCampbell
> What would you change and why?
I'd make sure there was a year zero.
Luke
--
To email me, take out the trash.
Coridon Henshaw <(chenshaw<RE<MOVE>@(T
news:kjbm609ej0d8ov9fv...@4ax.com:
> What would you change and why?
Microsoft is a 'standard' the world does not need.
--
Coridon Henshaw - http://www3.telus.net/csbh - "I have sadly come to the
conclusion that the Bush administration will go to any lengths to deny
reality." -- Charley Reese
Radovan Garabik
> Assume access to a non-paradoxical time travel machine.
>
> You might want to go back to a point where you can substitute
> something logical for what actually came into widespread use (after
> you become obscenely wealthy, of course).
>
> I've heard EEs saying it should have been a 200V@200cps electrical
> grid, others want all books bound at the top rather than on the side,
> and I doubt that few people would object to introducing the metric
> system 2000 years ago.
>
> Personally, I'd have made it a ten hour day, with ten waits in an
> hour, ten minutes in a wait, ten moments in a minute, ten seconds in a
> moment, etc.
>
too complicated - too many units
something like french revolution hours is not bad - 20 hours per day
(2x10 for day and night), 100 minutes, 100 seconds.
But anyway, it would be MUCH better to switch to duodecimal system
anyway.
>
> What would you change and why?
I'll show Novial to Schleyer and Zamenhof. Or maybe Interlingua, to
increase the chance of international acceptance.
And we would not have to communicate in English (yuck!).
Crossposted to alt.language.artificial, soc.history.what-if
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
| Radovan Garabík http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ |
| __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk |
-----------------------------------------------------------
Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus.
Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into your signature file to help me spread!
Bryan Derksen
<gar...@kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk> wrote:
>too complicated - too many units
>something like french revolution hours is not bad - 20 hours per day
>(2x10 for day and night), 100 minutes, 100 seconds.
Still too many units, IMO. I'd go all the way to the Swatch system;
divide the day into 1000 "beats", each 1 minute and 24.6 seconds long.
You can use centibeats for counting second-like intervals, and
dekabeats or hectobeats for hour-like ones.
http://www.swatch.com/internettime/home.php
>But anyway, it would be MUCH better to switch to duodecimal system
>anyway.
Hexadecimal. :)
>> What would you change and why?
It'd be nice to push XML's development (or something similar that
doesn't take as much space) as far into the past as possible, perhaps
as an adjunct to the ASCII standard; a standardized way of describing
the semantics of data files would make so many things much easier.
Perhaps try to make ASCII more Unicode-ready while I'm at it. It'll be
tricky balancing future expandability with the limitations of early
computers.
How about measuring all temperatures in kelvins? :)
Erik Max Francis
> Still too many units, IMO. I'd go all the way to the Swatch system;
> divide the day into 1000 "beats", each 1 minute and 24.6 seconds long.
> You can use centibeats for counting second-like intervals, and
> dekabeats or hectobeats for hour-like ones.
That's the standard metric approach to dividing up a day; Swatch didn't
invent it, they just chose to define it with @000 being their time
rather than GMT. The day is divided into decidays, centidays,
millidays, and so on.
--
__ Erik Max Francis && m...@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
/ \ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
\__/ Patiently, I'm still / Holding out until
-- Sandra St. Victor
Bernardz
> Bryan Derksen wrote:
>
> > Still too many units, IMO. I'd go all the way to the Swatch system;
> > divide the day into 1000 "beats", each 1 minute and 24.6 seconds long.
> > You can use centibeats for counting second-like intervals, and
> > dekabeats or hectobeats for hour-like ones.
>
> That's the standard metric approach to dividing up a day; Swatch didn't
> invent it, they just chose to define it with @000 being their time
> rather than GMT. The day is divided into decidays, centidays,
> millidays, and so on.
>
>
If someone is proposing changes to time what about the calendar.
The standard year is 365 days divided by 7 you get 52 weeks and one day.
Because of this one day extra we need every year a new calender as the
days of the week change to the date.
Well what if we had one day a year set aside as a special holiday which
is not a week day. Note on a leap year we would need two such days.
We could have now a permanent calendar
--
It is scarily when you consider that kooky conspiracy theorist actually
vote.
Observations of Bernard - No 57
Dr John Stockton
news:rec.arts.sf.science, Wildepad <wild...@newsguy.com> posted at Wed,
31 Mar 2004 19:28:39 :
>Assume access to a non-paradoxical time travel machine.
>
>You might want to go back to a point where you can substitute
>something logical for what actually came into widespread use (after
>you become obscenely wealthy, of course).
Counting on the fingers, rather than on the fingers-and-thumbs, thus
getting base 8; or in a binary mode in the fingers of one hand, leading
to base 16.
If the machine won't go back that far, introduce Arabic Numerals, with
zero, at the beginning of (Graeco-Roman) Classical times,
If the machine won't go back that far, give Archbishop Ussher's ideas to
Dionysius Exiguus, so that the Year Zero could be what we now call 4713
BC; and persuade DE of the benefits of year-month-day order and sensible
month-lengths.
If the machine won't go back that far, make America speak German.
If the machine won't go back that far, make C, etc., start indexing at 1
rather than 0 - a fertile source of error to remove.
--
© John Stockton, Surrey, UK. ?@merlyn.demon.co.uk Turnpike v4.00 MIME. ©
Web <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/> - w. FAQish topics, links, acronyms
PAS EXE etc : <URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/programs/> - see 00index.htm
Dates - miscdate.htm moredate.htm js-dates.htm pas-time.htm critdate.htm etc.
Jack Linthicum
> Wildepad <wild...@newsguy.com> wrote:
>
> :Assume access to a non-paradoxical time travel machine.
> :
> :You might want to go back to a point where you can substitute
> :something logical for what actually came into widespread use (after
> :you become obscenely wealthy, of course).
> :
> :I've heard EEs saying it should have been a 200V@200cps electrical
> :grid, others want all books bound at the top rather than on the side,
> :and I doubt that few people would object to introducing the metric
> :system 2000 years ago.
>
I know of one computer installer who would like for a world-wide
standard 50/60 cps, 110 220 200 volts. He took a very expensive
computer from the US to Geneva in 1979 and set it up and, after many
warnings, plugged it in. 50 cycles at 220-240 volts is not compatible
with 60 cycles and 110-120. But he confirmed the then experimentally
held belief that computers work on smoke, let the smoke out and the
computer stops.
Christian Weisgerber
> Well, there was/is the RS232 "standard" with all the various
> combinations of baud, word length, parity, hardware or software flow
> control, that actually make it dozens, if not hundreds or thousands,
> or "standards."
Oh, you're complaining about so-called asynchronous mode, which was
invented sometime in the 1920s for electro-mechanical teletypes.
That has always been a poor man's technology. Proper serial
interfaces are of course synchronous and clocked, which EIA-232
(the standard) very much provides for. Run a sensible HDLC-based
framing protocol over it, and you're all set. The problem is, this
was rather expensive in the old days of 8-bit microprocessors and
even more so before.
The electrical part of EIA-232 (also defined in V.28) sucks, too.
You really want to use differential signals. Plenty of existing
standards to choose from, but of course they were always a bit more
expensive.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de
Keith Morrison
>>:What would you change and why?
>>
>> Push-button phones are laid out like this:
>>
>>1 2 3
>>4 5 6
>>7 8 9
>>* 0 #
>>
>> while calculators are laid out like this:
>>
>>7 8 9
>>4 5 6
>>1 2 3
>>{whatever}.
>>
>> I'd make them the same.
>>
>> Trivial, I know.
>
> It's not really trivial, and there are many minor quirks like this.
> One of my own complaints is that if you look at tv listings, they go
> from the lowest number at the top to the higher numbered channels at
> the bottom, but if you surf through the channels, pushing the top
> button on the remote takes you up in number but down the list.
Some satellite receivers allow you to arrange the TV guide listing
lowest-highest or highest-lowest. Mine is set up so the higher-
numbered channels are at the top.
In the whatever-hundred channel universe, my bitch about TV listings
is when you've got several affiliates of the same network, they should
be grouped together irrespective of channel number.
--
Keith
Keith Morrison
>>Still too many units, IMO. I'd go all the way to the Swatch system;
>>divide the day into 1000 "beats", each 1 minute and 24.6 seconds long.
>>You can use centibeats for counting second-like intervals, and
>>dekabeats or hectobeats for hour-like ones.
>
> That's the standard metric approach to dividing up a day; Swatch didn't
> invent it, they just chose to define it with @000 being their time
> rather than GMT. The day is divided into decidays, centidays,
> millidays, and so on.
Julian dating. 0 was noon Universal time, 1 Jan 4713 BCE.
It's now about 1830 UT, April 1, 2004, as I;m writing this, which
is a Julian Date of 2453097.27083 (18:30:00 UT, to be exact).
Note also that something similar was used (very inconsistantly)
in the latter Star Trek series regarding the Stardate. A year
had 1000 units, so "Stardate 51000.0" was 51 years after some
reference date.
--
Keith
Jack Linthicum
> In article <406BE948...@alcyone.com>, m...@alcyone.com says...
> > Bryan Derksen wrote:
> >
> > > Still too many units, IMO. I'd go all the way to the Swatch system;
> > > divide the day into 1000 "beats", each 1 minute and 24.6 seconds long.
> > > You can use centibeats for counting second-like intervals, and
> > > dekabeats or hectobeats for hour-like ones.
> >
> > That's the standard metric approach to dividing up a day; Swatch didn't
> > invent it, they just chose to define it with @000 being their time
> > rather than GMT. The day is divided into decidays, centidays,
> > millidays, and so on.
> >
> >
>
> If someone is proposing changes to time what about the calendar.
>
> The standard year is 365 days divided by 7 you get 52 weeks and one day.
>
> Because of this one day extra we need every year a new calender as the
> days of the week change to the date.
>
> Well what if we had one day a year set aside as a special holiday which
> is not a week day. Note on a leap year we would need two such days.
>
> We could have now a permanent calendar
What for? Virtually every business gives away a new calendar every
year, for those who are more artistically inclined the book stores
sell calendars with every theme from religion to your favorite
explosive device. I write on my calendar, I do not want to attend the
same funeral every year, it is a quirk of mine I picked up from
undertaker grandfather and uncle. If we rectify the little things like
February and its lack of days what are we going to do about those
clumsy religious holidays that depend on phases of the moon or the
complete lunar calendar. We have computers and radio stations to tell
us what day it is.
George W. Harris
:Assume access to a non-paradoxical time travel machine.
:
:You might want to go back to a point where you can substitute
:something logical for what actually came into widespread use (after
:you become obscenely wealthy, of course).
:
:I've heard EEs saying it should have been a 200V@200cps electrical
:grid, others want all books bound at the top rather than on the side,
:and I doubt that few people would object to introducing the metric
:system 2000 years ago.
:
:Personally, I'd have made it a ten hour day, with ten waits in an
:hour, ten minutes in a wait, ten moments in a minute, ten seconds in a
:moment, etc.
I'd establish a set of units (mass, distance, time)
such that c, G and h are all equal to 1.
--
Real men don't need macho posturing to bolster their egos.
George W. Harris For actual email address, replace each 'u' with an 'i'.
Erik Max Francis
> Note also that something similar was used (very inconsistantly)
> in the latter Star Trek series regarding the Stardate. A year
> had 1000 units, so "Stardate 51000.0" was 51 years after some
> reference date.
It changed throughout the different series, so the definition wasn't
that clean or consistent.
--
__ Erik Max Francis && m...@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
/ \ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
\__/ Wretches hang that jurymen may dine.
-- Alexander Pope
G. Waleed Kavalec
"Erik Max Francis" <m...@alcyone.com> wrote in message
news:406C960B...@alcyone.com...
> Keith Morrison wrote:
>
> > Note also that something similar was used (very inconsistantly)
> > in the latter Star Trek series regarding the Stardate. A year
> > had 1000 units, so "Stardate 51000.0" was 51 years after some
> > reference date.
>
> It changed throughout the different series, so the definition wasn't
> that clean or consistent.
Gene Rodenberry once "explained" on some interview that star-dates had to
take location relative to the galactic center into account.
It was a good out. ;-)
DJensen
> DJensen <m...@no-spam-thanks.net> wrote:
>
>>I'd want the [modern, western] calendar fixed, for sure: 10
>>months of 36 days (six weeks of six days each), plus an
>>intercalary week of 5 (6 with a leap day) at the end/start of
>>each year[1] -- which would be set around one of the equinoxes.
>
> not real practical benefit.
On a 10x36+5(sometimes 6) calendar, each month of each year in
each olympiad begins on the same day of the week, with drift of
one day (backwards) only every new olympiad (unless you decide
that the intercalary week doesn't affect which day the following
month starts, then no drift at all). Makes planning for future
events, down to the day of the week, much easier for everyone and
cuts back on a lot of holiday drift.
>>I'm sure there's all sorts of things that could be done in the
>>areas of city planning and mass transit... maybe divorcing the
>>width of train tracks from the width of two horses pulling a
>>cart? We've been passing that along since the Roman Empire.
>
> No. That's been passing around since the begining of the internet.
Well no, the story only gained a booster from the internet (what
urban legend hasn't?) but it's been urban legend material since
WWII. Note though that Snopes only faults the legend for some of
its embellishments and ignoring the logic behind why the guage
persisted, otherwise it's basically true (for most of North
America and I assume modern Britain):
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.htm
--
DJensen
DJensen
> DJensen <m...@no-spam-thanks.net> wrote:
>>Circles of 100 degrees rather than 360 (which is related to the
>>calendar but doesn't need to be). This could give us something
>>like base-10 time too, in a roundabout way.
>
> Ugh. 100 has too few factors. 360's got tons.
>
> You could use gradians (IIRC). 400 grad == 360 deg.
How about 1000 then?
--
DJensen
DJensen
> Wildepad wrote:
>> What would you change and why?
>
> I'd make sure there was a year zero.
I don't see a practical reason for that.
--
DJensen
Bernard Peek
Harris <gha...@mundsprung.com> writes
>Wildepad <wild...@newsguy.com> wrote:
>
>:Assume access to a non-paradoxical time travel machine.
>:
>:You might want to go back to a point where you can substitute
>:something logical for what actually came into widespread use (after
>:you become obscenely wealthy, of course).
>:
>:I've heard EEs saying it should have been a 200V@200cps electrical
>:grid, others want all books bound at the top rather than on the side,
>:and I doubt that few people would object to introducing the metric
>:system 2000 years ago.
>:
>:Personally, I'd have made it a ten hour day, with ten waits in an
>:hour, ten minutes in a wait, ten moments in a minute, ten seconds in a
>:moment, etc.
>
> I'd establish a set of units (mass, distance, time)
>such that c, G and h are all equal to 1.
Try foot, nanosecond, jupiter-mass.
--
Bernard Peek
London, UK. DBA, Manager, Trainer & Author. Will work for money.
nyra
>
> Bernardz <Berna...@REMOVEhotmail.com> wrote in message news:<MPG.1ad6b240eb771472989a3f@news>...
> > In article <406BE948...@alcyone.com>, m...@alcyone.com says...
> > > Bryan Derksen wrote:
> > >
> > > > Still too many units, IMO. I'd go all the way to the Swatch system;
> > > > divide the day into 1000 "beats", each 1 minute and 24.6 seconds long.
> > > > You can use centibeats for counting second-like intervals, and
> > > > dekabeats or hectobeats for hour-like ones.
> > >
> > > That's the standard metric approach to dividing up a day; Swatch didn't
> > > invent it, they just chose to define it with @000 being their time
> > > rather than GMT. The day is divided into decidays, centidays,
> > > millidays, and so on.
> > >
> > >
> >
> > If someone is proposing changes to time what about the calendar.
> >
> > The standard year is 365 days divided by 7 you get 52 weeks and one day.
> >
> > Because of this one day extra we need every year a new calender as the
> > days of the week change to the date.
The days of the week also change from month to month. To make the
calendar more rational, i think the french revolution calendar (12
months of 30 days each; 3 "decades" of ten days each per month; 5 or 6
extra days outside of the month/decade count) was a very viable
approach; one could fiddle with the individual parameters, but i think
a month-equivalent shouldn't be shorter than 20 days (18 months per
year) or longer than 60 (6 per year); and the number of days in the
"normal" year - without the extra days - should be easily
subdividible, which rules out 364, which has the unwieldy 13 as prime
factor.
> > Well what if we had one day a year set aside as a special holiday which
> > is not a week day. Note on a leap year we would need two such days.
> >
> > We could have now a permanent calendar
>
> What for? Virtually every business gives away a new calendar every
> year, for those who are more artistically inclined the book stores
> sell calendars with every theme from religion to your favorite
> explosive device.
With a variation on the revolution calendar, the week day of every day
in every month in every year would be instantly obvious (if it's the
16th of a "month", it's always the 6th day of the decade). The
practical value wouldn't be immense, but it'd be there.
> If we rectify the little things like
> February and its lack of days what are we going to do about those
> clumsy religious holidays that depend on phases of the moon or the
> complete lunar calendar.
You won't get to tell the churches when to celebrate easter, they'll
use their own religious calendar for these purposes. The islamic
calendar is completely asynchronous to ours[1], and orthodox churches
still calculate religious holidays after the julian calendar instead
of the gregorian. I don't see why western christianity should have a
problem with a discrepancy between the "secular" and "ritual"
calendar.
[1] iirc they manage to fit 34 years into 33 solar years.
I would like to see a non-geocentric system of measurements; of
course, what to base such a system on? Measurements of the hydrogen
atom? And a system of time measurement which doesn't care about Earth
would necessarily be relegated to a mostly symbolical status, as
humans' life rhythm depends on day/night cycles - introducing a
"stardate day" of 18 earth hours just wouldn't work for many people.
--
Omnis clocha clochabilis, in clocherio clochando, clochans
clochativo clochare facit clochabiliter clochantes.
F. Rabelais, Gargantua
Warren Okuma
"Wildepad" <wild...@newsguy.com> wrote in message
news:kjbm609ej0d8ov9fv...@4ax.com...
> Assume access to a non-paradoxical time travel machine.
>
> You might want to go back to a point where you can substitute
> something logical for what actually came into widespread use (after
> you become obscenely wealthy, of course).
>
> I've heard EEs saying it should have been a 200V@200cps electrical
> grid, others want all books bound at the top rather than on the side,
> and I doubt that few people would object to introducing the metric
> system 2000 years ago.
>
> Personally, I'd have made it a ten hour day, with ten waits in an
> hour, ten minutes in a wait, ten moments in a minute, ten seconds in a
> moment, etc.
>
>
Replace all other systems of measure with the metric system... grams,
meters, etc...
Why? Because it's easier on science and folks.
John
"Wildepad" <wild...@newsguy.com> wrote in message
news:kjbm609ej0d8ov9fv...@4ax.com...
> Assume access to a non-paradoxical time travel machine.
>
>
All countries to use the same television, power and plug standard(s), as
well as the same road rules and side-of-road driving.
Ben Bradley
Where were you four or five years ago? It would have saved the
stupid people from so vehemently disagreeing with the smart people
about when the 21st Century started.
I dunno if it's true, but back around y2k I heard there had been no
disagreement that the 20th Century started in 1901.
Ben Bradley
>On Thu, 1 Apr 2004 17:46:19 +0100, Dr John Stockton
><sp...@merlyn.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>JRS: In article <kjbm609ej0d8ov9fv...@4ax.com>, seen in
>>news:rec.arts.sf.science, Wildepad <wild...@newsguy.com> posted at Wed,
>>31 Mar 2004 19:28:39 :
>>>Assume access to a non-paradoxical time travel machine.
Does that mean I can kill someone else's grandfather?
>>Counting on the fingers, rather than on the fingers-and-thumbs, thus
>>getting base 8; or in a binary mode in the fingers of one hand, leading
>>to base 16.
>
>There are 10 kinds of people in the world.
>Those who understand binary and those who don't.
>
>There are 11 kinds of people in the world.
>Those who understand unary and those who don't.
>
>There are 3 kinds of people in the world.
>Those who can count and those who can't.
>
>>If the machine won't go back that far, make America speak German.
I get the vague feeling that this thread just got Godwinized...
>>If the machine won't go back that far, make C, etc., start indexing at 1
>>rather than 0 - a fertile source of error to remove.
Hmm, someone wanted the year numbering scheme to start at 0 rather
than 1. Actually, in addition to my other post, this could have helped
Jesus, as his age would correspond to the year AD. As it was, I'm sure
he got confused and had to double-check himself at times: "Let's see,
it's the year 11 AD, but I'm actually only 10 years old..." ;)
There are two kinds of people in the world:
0. Those who start enumerating with the number zero, and
1. Those who don't.
>I, too, thought that at one time, but once I got used to it I found it
>eminently useful.
There are enough ways to fsck up in C (even just fencepost and
related counting errors, not to mention things like using == when
meaning = and vice versa) that changing the index (and presuming it's
actually better starting with 1 than with 0) won't fix more than maybe
one percent of the problems. Caveat coder.
Erik Max Francis
> If the machine won't go back that far, make C, etc., start indexing at
> 1
> rather than 0 - a fertile source of error to remove.
This is hardly an error -- it makes a great deal more sense from a
computer science perspective to index from 0 rather than 1. For one
thing, it's the lowest unsigned value of any unsigned type (whereas 1 is
not the lowest value of any integral type), and for another, since
array/pointer subscription works by addressing, 0 is the offset of the
first element of an array, not 1.
Some people don't like it, but indexing from 0 is not an arbitrary
choice, it was done for a very good, and still valid, reason.
--
__ Erik Max Francis && m...@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
/ \ San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM erikmaxfrancis
\__/ Do not stand in a place of danger trusting in miracles.
-- (an Arab proverb)
Erik Max Francis
>
> Wildepad wrote:
> > What would you change and why?
>
> I'd make sure there was a year zero.
That seems kind of a waste to blow your wish on, since this can easily
by a notational change, rather than requiring an actual change
propagating back through history. Just write n AD as n, 1 BC as 0, and
n BC (n > 1) as (-n - 1).
To actually change the historical account, you'd probably have to have
Western civilization adopt the concept of the number zero a little
earlier as well ...
Aaron Bergman
Not allow programs to overwrite the execution stack.
Aaron