It's not a matter of choosing what the period does. It's a matter of codifying what it already does. Certainly, you can treat "3 lbs." as a regular word. Tha

It's not a matter of choosing what the period does. It's a matter of codifying what it already does. Certainly, you can treat "3 lbs." as a regular word. That is another use case for a period, which also needs to be handled. That also means that a period can either appear inside a word, or between words. The long story is that a period can mean many, many different things.