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Comment by wizofaus | Hacker News Reader

Debatable - the concept of leap years was invented before 0 AD/CE but I'm not aware of any reason to believe that particular year (which certainly wasn't called 0 AD at the time, it was possibly the Roman year 753) was considered to be one.

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0 isn't a year anyway, 1AD is preceded by 1BC.

Wikipedia has some information on leap years around this time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar#Leap_year_erro...

Interesting that there seem to be a large number of scholars who would accept either 4 AD or 8 AD was the first AD leap year. But less clear what such a year would have been called by Romans at the time. I'm assuming it wasn't common to include full dates (including the year #) on written documents at the time, otherwise surely we'd know pretty much exactly. I gather AD-based year numbering wasn't actually introduced until ~525 AD (but before that a number of systems had been in use).

0 is a year if we say it is, which astronomers have for hundreds of years (because its extremely mathematically convenient), and which ISO-8601 does.

Year 0 is what historians like to call 1 BC, but historians are also just making that up. Nobody numbered years from Anno Domini anywhere near year 0.

I'm sure it's clear to everybody here why year 0, -1, and -2 are significantly better arbitrary, ahistorical names for the three years preceding year 1.

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