Signed Years Without Year 0
Although he used the usual French terms "avant J.-C." (before Jesus Christ) and "après J.-C." (after Jesus Christ) to label years elsewhere in his book, the Byzantine historian Venance Grumel used negative years (identified by a minus sign, −) to label BC years and unsigned positive years to label AD years in a table, possibly to save space, without a year 0 between them.
The XML Schema language, sometimes used in connection with representing data for storage in computers, contains built-in primitive datatypes, date and dateTime, which do not allow a year zero, and designate years BC as negative numbers. Years contain at least four digits. Thus -0001 in that language is equivalent to 1 BC. However, the defining recommendation indicates a change to a system similar to ISO 8601 and astronomical year numbering is likely in the future.
Read more about this topic: Astronomical Year Numbering
Famous quotes containing the words signed, years and/or year:
“I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. He said, “You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it.” And I said, “But, Daddy, no one’s going to see it!” And he said, “Yeah, but I know it’s there.” So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
“Six years of such small preoccupations!
Six years of shuttling in and out of this place!
O my hunger! My hunger!
I could have gone around the world twice
or had new children all boys.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)