News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Why don't we listen to Occam's Razor when it comes to programming languages?. Parent comment

Re:Why don't we listen to Occam's Razor when it comes to pro... by CyberFonic on Wednesday December 09, 2015 @07:49PM (#10708086)
Roman numerals did not have a zero. It could only be used to represent counting numbers between 1 and 3999. As abstraction s go it failed to accommodate a large number of situations that Arabic numbers could.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why don't we listen to Occam's Razor when it comes to pro... by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday December 09, 2015 @08:43PM (#10708290)
I don't think that's right. Roman numerals allowed a bar over the number to indicate that it was multiplied by a thousand. One million, for example, was an M with a bar over it.

I agree about "counting numbers", though. So far as I know, it was impossible to represent fractions or decimals in Roman numerals.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Why don't we listen to Occam's Razor when it comes to pro... by davelnewton on Saturday December 12, 2015 @02:45PM (#10723882)
They used `S` for "half", with dots for additional fractions of twelve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Fractions

And here I thought I'd never need to know that.

[ Parent | on HN ]