Roman numerals also don’t have a zero. In Europe, use of zero only became predominant in the 16th century

Indeed, it was a hot topic for Shakespeare.

https://theconversation.com/shakespeare-by-numbers-how-mathe...

Sometimes they would write "nil."

So the concept of null?

Honestly I’ve always separated the two in my brain but never really thought about it. Nil = 0 or the absence of a quantity, null = the absence of any value at all.

What do you think of Go's nil vs Java's null?