Zero has two roles: as a positional placeholder and as a cardinal value (nothingness or net-zero). This only addresses the former.
j16sdiz 2 hours ago [-]
Afaict, most ancient civization have conception of "nothingness" or "emptiness".
The dispute is often whether they consider it as a number or not
Beijinger 1 hours ago [-]
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gmuslera 5 hours ago [-]
Looks like translating a positional numbering system from ancient cultures than ruling out or not if they had the concept of zero. It may be a single use symbol, here is nothing, instead of being part of bigger amounts. Numbering systems doesn't have to be positional (nor go too far).
whatsThisBtn4 4 hours ago [-]
Gosh I love Wittgenstein for this.
I highly recommend suffering through both early and late Wittgenstein (only wrote 2 books and essentially invented one of the 3 branches of philosophy).
Expect to only understand 10% of what he says, but that is normal.
Separately, pragmatism by William James is an easy 4 hour read and you can have 2/3 of the branches of meta philosophy.
thaumasiotes 14 minutes ago [-]
> If you knew somehow that some symbol corresponds to 20, then you’d know they didn’t use base 20 because base b doesn’t have a single symbol for b.
Well, this is plainly false.
conartist6 2 hours ago [-]
What I wonder is: why has nobody noticed that code editors lack a concept of 0?
When you're writing code, you can express any concept except that of an unfilled hole. We've rearranged every part of the coding process in a twisted-up way, all for the lack of a way to express lack.
If you want to be more clear about what I mean, look to tools which can express holes like https://scratch.mit.edu and https://hazel.org. They give the feeling of letting things snap together like lego bricks. Indeed, lego bricks themselves function because of the negative space (the holes) in them!
onestay42 2 hours ago [-]
How about an `extern` variable in C?
conartist6 2 hours ago [-]
A million variations exist. I'm looking for a programming-language-agnostic concept. The closest you'll find are templating languages like Handlebars
skew-aberration 41 minutes ago [-]
Delimited continuations? Though I'm not totally clear what you're asking for. Semantics or syntax?
NotBenny 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 05:02:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I highly recommend suffering through both early and late Wittgenstein (only wrote 2 books and essentially invented one of the 3 branches of philosophy).
Expect to only understand 10% of what he says, but that is normal.
Separately, pragmatism by William James is an easy 4 hour read and you can have 2/3 of the branches of meta philosophy.
Well, this is plainly false.
When you're writing code, you can express any concept except that of an unfilled hole. We've rearranged every part of the coding process in a twisted-up way, all for the lack of a way to express lack.
If you want to be more clear about what I mean, look to tools which can express holes like https://scratch.mit.edu and https://hazel.org. They give the feeling of letting things snap together like lego bricks. Indeed, lego bricks themselves function because of the negative space (the holes) in them!