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A comment on The oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a definite date. Parent comment

Re:The oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a defini... by breadbox on Friday May 24, 2013 @12:36PM (#5763916)
The Babylonians got by using a place-system without zero for a long time. People relied on context to disambiguate.

(It probably helped that with a base-60 system, one was six times less likely to have a zero.)

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Re:The oldest "0" in India for which one can assign a defini... by glurgh on Friday May 24, 2013 @01:17PM (#5764166)
The disambiguation from context was disambiguation of scale because there was no radix point. They did have a way to indicate a zero-valued position in a number, without that you can't really 'disambiguate' or have a positional number system at all.
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