From: Hohberger, Clive (CHohberger@zebra.com)
Date: Mon Oct 11 2004 - 12:08:21 CST
Mike,
I agree with you... almost.. I think that AD and BC are really ordinal numbers, which denote relative position in a series from a 1-origin point. I thought "1 AD" really stands for "primo anno domine" (pardon my forgotten Latin) or "first year of our lord".
Cardinal numbers denote quantity, and may be negative or zero as well as positive.
Clive
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Clive P Hohberger, PhD
Corporate VP, Technology Development
& Director of Patent Affairs
Zebra Technologies Corp.
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-----Original Message-----
From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On Behalf Of Mike Ayers
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2004 11:57 AM
To: unicode@unicode.org
Subject: RE: bit notation in ISO-8859-x is wrong
> 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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