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 ones going to see it! And he said, Yeah, but I know its there. So when I was working in kitchens, I did good work.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
“Jugful of milk! It was yours years ago
when I lived in the valley of my bones,
bones dumb in the swamp. Little playthings.”
—Anne Sexton (19281974)
“Like to the time o th year between the extremes
Of hot and cold, he was nor sad nor merry.”
—William Shakespeare (15641616)