The Word of God

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> Not to sound ignorant, but could you clarify the statment regarding the Roman
> Empire and the 0 ?  THanks

It's a computer programmers joke, and like many computer programmer
jokes it's fairly sublime.  While the Romans did have a concept for
zero, they didn't use zero as a placeholder; this idea was introduced
by the Arabs to the European world: the Romans had to use them clunky
Roman numerals to count with, y'know MCMXVII and all that.

> One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking
> zero,
> they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.
>         -- Robert Firth

In C programs, successful termination of a program is usually indicated
with a return code of zero.  Since the ancient Romans didn't have zeroes
(so to speak), all of their C programs returned with failure.

Richard "computer people have a weird sense of humor" Masoner
richardm@cd.com