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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 sys
by breadbox 13y ago
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.)
- glurgh 13y agoThe 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.