Astro Hacker News - How would you know whether an ancient culture had zero?

lisp2240 |next [-]

Zero has two roles: as a positional placeholder and as a cardinal value (nothingness or net-zero). This only addresses the former.

j16sdiz |root |parent |next [-]

Afaict, most ancient civization have conception of "nothingness" or "emptiness". The dispute is often whether they consider it as a number or not

philipov |root |parent [-]

We have both. Zero and Null are different data types.

Beijinger |root |parent |previous [-]

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gmuslera |next |previous [-]

Looks like translating a positional numbering system from ancient cultures than ruling out or not if they had the concept of zero. It may be a single use symbol, here is nothing, instead of being part of bigger amounts. Numbering systems doesn't have to be positional (nor go too far).

whatsThisBtn4 |root |parent [-]

Gosh I love Wittgenstein for this.

I highly recommend suffering through both early and late Wittgenstein (only wrote 2 books and essentially invented one of the 3 branches of philosophy).

Expect to only understand 10% of what he says, but that is normal.

Separately, pragmatism by William James is an easy 4 hour read and you can have 2/3 of the branches of meta philosophy.

thaumasiotes |next |previous [-]

> If you knew somehow that some symbol corresponds to 20, then you’d know they didn’t use base 20 because base b doesn’t have a single symbol for b.

Well, this is plainly false.

CamperBob2 |root |parent [-]

I suppose Roman numerals would be one counterexample, but are there any number systems based on place/position value that qualify as counterexamples?

thaumasiotes |root |parent [-]

Of course. The Chinese number system is base 10 (or, if you scale way up, base 10,000) with a positional writing system.

The symbol for ten is 十. Heck, there's also a symbol for twenty, 廿, and it exists despite the number system being base 10.

If you're curious, zero is 零. Successive zeroes are combined, so 一千零一 is 1001.

conartist6 |next |previous [-]

What I wonder is: why has nobody noticed that code editors lack a concept of 0?

When you're writing code, you can express any concept except that of an unfilled hole. We've rearranged every part of the coding process in a twisted-up way, all for the lack of a way to express lack.

If you want to be more clear about what I mean, look to tools which can express holes like https://scratch.mit.edu and https://hazel.org. They give the feeling of letting things snap together like lego bricks. Indeed, lego bricks themselves function because of the negative space (the holes) in them!

mungoman2 |root |parent |next [-]

This could be interesting but too vague for me to understand what you mean. Could it be explained more clearly, or link some blog entry?

conartist6 |root |parent [-]

Yeah, I will. I'm being a bit coy because I already have a very specific solution in mind which would be a lot like Scratch, but unifying those ideas with syntax. It should be fully ready to share quite soon.

dosisking |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Like Madlibs?

conartist6isme |root |parent [-]

Ugh I got rate limited so I had to make a new acct just to post this reply:

Sure! Like mad libs if you couldn't be sure if _____ was a missing part or the text what was meant to be there. In a mad lib it's obvious, but with code it may be less obvious. You certainly can't just use _ with code. Even the nil code point is allowed in some programming languages' source code (e.g. rust).

onestay42 |root |parent |previous [-]

How about an `extern` variable in C?

conartist6 |root |parent [-]

A million variations exist. I'm looking for a programming-language-agnostic concept. The closest you'll find are templating languages like Handlebars

skew-aberration |root |parent [-]

Delimited continuations? Though I'm not totally clear what you're asking for. Semantics or syntax?

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NotBenny |previous [-]

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