4 ms·

I'm not (at the moment) a potential user of this, but I just wanted to say that it was a fantastic page with a really good presentation of the project and its c

by unwind 1y ago

I'm not (at the moment) a potential user of this, but I just wanted to say that it was a fantastic page with a really good presentation of the project and its capabilities. One micro-question on the editing: why are numbers written with an apostrophe (') as the thousands-separator [1]? I know that is used for this purpose in Switzerland and that many programming languages support it. It just seemed very strange for English text, where typically comma (,) would be used, of course. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Digit_grouping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Digit_groupi... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Miscellaneous_uses_in_other_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Miscellaneous_uses_...

adrian_b 1y ago
This is the stupid choice made by the C++ (2014) standard. A digit separator for increased readability of long numbers has been first introduced by Ada (1979-06), which has used the underscore. This usage matched the original reason for the introduction of the underscore in the character set, which had been done by PL/I (1964-12), for increasing the readability of long identifiers, while avoiding the ambiguity caused by using hyphen for that purpose, as previously in COBOL (many LISPs have retained the COBOL usage of the hyphen, because they, like COBOL, do not normally write arithmetic expressions with operators). Most programming languages that have added a digit separator have followed Ada, by using the underscore. 35 years later, C++ should have done the same and I hate whoever thought otherwise within the people who have updated the standard, causing thus completely unnecessary compatibility problems, e.g. when copying a big initialized array between program text sources written in different languages. There was some flawed argument against the underscore that it could have caused some parsing problems in some weird legacy programs, but they were not more difficult to solve than avoiding parsing errors caused by the legacy use of the apostrophe in character constants (i.e. forbidding the digit separator as the first character in a number is enough to ensure a non-ambiguous parsing) .
ashvardanian 1y ago
Thanks for the kind words! In this case, it isn’t tied to any programming language or locale-specific formatting. I just find commas less readable in long numbers, especially in running text across Western languages. Apostrophes feel clearer to me, so I usually stick with them.

by unwind 1y ago

adrian_b 1y ago

This is the stupid choice made by the C++ (2014) standard. A digit separator for increased readability of long numbers has been first introduced by Ada (1979-06), which has used the underscore. This usage matched the original reason for the introduction of the underscore in the character set, which had been done by PL/I (1964-12), for increasing the readability of long identifiers, while avoiding the ambiguity caused by using hyphen for that purpose, as previously in COBOL (many LISPs have retained the COBOL usage of the hyphen, because they, like COBOL, do not normally write arithmetic expressions with operators). Most programming languages that have added a digit separator have followed Ada, by using the underscore. 35 years later, C++ should have done the same and I hate whoever thought otherwise within the people who have updated the standard, causing thus completely unnecessary compatibility problems, e.g. when copying a big initialized array between program text sources written in different languages. There was some flawed argument against the underscore that it could have caused some parsing problems in some weird legacy programs, but they were not more difficult to solve than avoiding parsing errors caused by the legacy use of the apostrophe in character constants (i.e. forbidding the digit separator as the first character in a number is enough to ensure a non-ambiguous parsing) .

ashvardanian 1y ago

Thanks for the kind words! In this case, it isn’t tied to any programming language or locale-specific formatting. I just find commas less readable in long numbers, especially in running text across Western languages. Apostrophes feel clearer to me, so I usually stick with them.