[rcoveson]

There is no year zero according to first-order pedants. Second-order pedants know that there is a year zero in both the astronomical year numbering system and in ISO 8601, so whether or not there is a year zero depends on context.

It's ultimately up to us to decide how to project our relatively young calendar system way back into the past before it was invented. Year zero makes everything nice. Be like astronomers and be like ISO. Choose year zero.

[worstspotgain]

Yes but, is there such a thing as a zeroth-order pedant, someone not pedantic about year ordinality? As a first-order meta-pedant, this would be my claim.

Moreover, I definitely find the ordinality of pedantry more interesting than the pedantry of ordinality.

[jessekv]

Interesting indeed. I suppose third-order pedantry must be "jerk".

[nativeit]

Thank you for your service.

[marc_abonce]

> It's ultimately up to us to decide how to project our relatively young calendar system way back into the past before it was invented. Year zero makes everything nice. Be like astronomers and be like ISO. Choose year zero.

Or, just to add more fuel to the fire, we could use the Holocene/Human year numbering system to have a year zero and avoid any ambiguity between Gregorian and ISO dates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

[m2f2]

Talking about standards let's not pick and choose.

First, let's get rid of miles and feet, then we could even discuss this.

[lobsterthief]

If only—I think most US citizens who actually work with units of measurement on a daily basis would love to switch to the metric system. Unfortunately, everyone else wants to keep our “freedom units” (and pennies)

[jl6]

We are all defacto ISO adherents by virtue of our lives being so highly computer-mediated and standardized. I’m fully on board with stating that there absolutely was a year zero, and translating from legacy calendars where necessary.

[hollerith]

I vote for a year zero and for using two's complement for representing years before zero (because it makes computing durations that span zero a little easier).