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Give ma a cigar, man!

The "concept" of a void such as an empty column to indicate a 'Null" value was developed independently all over the world. The earliest writings that exists to this end comes from the Surmeans (Babylonians) but even the concept of using a symbol to represent the empty space (similar to programmers writing a 'b' or 's' with a slash through it to mean 'blank' or 'space') came long after that earliest writing.

To say the Babylonians first came up with the concept would be blinding yourself to the fact that two world cultures came up with the value 'zero' when the Babylonians were still using a space indicator. THey still had no concept of the "value" we now call zero.

The constants 'null' and 'nil' are two separate items. One is the lack of a value the other is a value of no consequence. Zero goes much further than this as the zero in "1,234,560" is very insignificant but the zero in "10,234,567" is extremely significant.

The concept of a zero was introduced to the Babylonians and Persians by the Hindi from India and to the Arabs from the Persians and to the old Western world by the Arabs.

Meanwhile, in the new Western world, the Mayans were very happy calculating the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

Posted by: The King's Servant   Posted on: 02/13/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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