On Feb 17, 2010, at 2:26 AM, Ozgur Akgun wrote:
Wikipedia claims in short that "Year Zero is the year before 1 A.D. used in astronomical calculations.". In full: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_zero
Seems like no calendar, other than astronomical things include it
That's not what that page says. Read on, where it says "there is a year zero in ... ISO 8601:2004 (where it coincides with the Gregorian year 1 BC)" and later "ISO 8601:2004 (and previously ISO 8601:2000, but not ISO 8601:1988) explicitly uses astronomical year numbering in its date reference systems.". Read that carefully; it doesn't mean that the 1988 edition of the standard didn't use year zero, just that it was not explicit about it. ISO 8601 is *the* international standard for representing dates and times. Sort of. XML Schema adopts 8601 *formats* but in section D.3.2 explicitly rejects year 0. Why they felt it advisible to override a core industry standard is not clear to me.