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Prior to some programming languages adopting it, I don't think there was precedent for using underscore as a thousands separator, so I don't consider it a stron

Prior to some programming languages adopting it, I don't think there was precedent for using underscore as a thousands separator, so I don't consider it a strong precedent. The first language I recall using it was Ada. But I understand that using apostrophe has problems that would likely make its adoption impossible for an existing language. I was actually surprised when C++ adopted it. Interestingly, there is a locale that uses apostrophe for the thousands separator: de_CH (Swiss German). Try this in bash: $ LC_NUMERIC=de_CH df --block-size=\'1KB I don't know if there is a locale that uses underscore, I didn't find one when I looked a while back. Perhaps there should be...

acdha 8y ago
Yeah, wikipedia cites some unspecified maritime usage of _ but it's definitely not common. It seems like most of the standards outside of programming languages have been moving towards spaces. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an easy way to search e.g. https://lh.2xlibre.net/values/thousands_sep/ https://lh.2xlibre.net/values/thousands_sep/ but some lazy JavaScript shows no underscores and several flavors of whitespace: new Set($(".value").map((idx, elem) => elem.textContent)) Set(8) [ "", ",", ".", " ", " ", "'", " ", "٬" ]