From: Mike Ayers (mike.ayers@tumbleweed.com)
Date: Mon Oct 11 2004 - 10:56:58 CST
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org
> [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Kent Karlsson
> Both of the AD and BC systems (really) have zero and negative
> year numbers,
No they don't. They're cardinal systems, which by definition have
neither zero nor negative values, which is why two scales are needed to
cover all time. This also explains the OP's question: the bits were
labelled cardinally. Whilst software folks often like to label the MSB as
zero and count upward, so that word values can be calculated handily,
hardware and protocol folks (more generally, everyone who is not writing
software) tend to favor cardinal labelling.
/|/|ike
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