A Date With Tim Peters...

[Konrad Hinsen]

Christian Tismer <tismer at appliedbiometrics.com> writes:

> Another viewpoint:
> What is your first birthday?
> It is the day after your first year of life,
> which starts on your zeroth birthay which is your birth.

This is in fact the convention we use for all measurements *except*
dates. The first day of a month gets the number one, not zero, etc.
But these are just arbitary conventions that differ between cultures,
even counting is not universal. Another strange habit (to us at least,
with the possible exception of musicians) is "inclusive counting",
i.e. counting the first *and* last item when calculating differences,
yielding for example two days between Monday and Tuesday. This was
customary with the Romans and led to some misunderstandings in the
application of leap years.
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Konrad Hinsen                            | E-Mail: hinsen at cnrs-orleans.fr
Centre de Biophysique Moleculaire (CNRS) | Tel.: +33-2.38.25.55.69
Rue Charles Sadron                       | Fax:  +33-2.38.63.15.17
45071 Orleans Cedex 2                    | Deutsch/Esperanto/English/
France                                   | Nederlands/Francais
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------