4 ms·
As for the decimal mark (comma), it's most of the world really. This has nothing to do with grouping in numbers. I find both types of thousands separator (, or
by rplnt 13y ago
As for the decimal mark (comma), it's most of the world really. This has nothing to do with grouping in numbers. I find both types of thousands separator (, or .) misleading, pointless and not nice at all. But maybe that's because I grew up in a country that used neither of those.
- hessenwolf 13y agoI have to deal with a lot of millions and billions in work (reinsurance). Thousands separators are so essential to me!!
- rplnt 13y agoYes, they are. I just prefer to use space for this.
- hessenwolf 13y agoA space is a pain to transmit between umpteen file formats.
- thanatropism 13y agoDon't you find exponent notation to be neater? 1E+03 = one thousand 1E+06 = one million 1E+09 = a thousand millions / an american billion 1E+12 = an american trillion / an european billion .. and that's as far as you need; the GDP of most countries is on the order of 1E+12 or 1E+13
- sbd 13y agoI assume he requires a few more significant figures in his line of work
- sysop073 13y agoIt's not like scientific notation precludes that. 1.234567E+06 = 1234567, but it's also at a glance obviously around 1 million
- infruset 13y agowait wait wait, a billion means two different things in Europe and America? I'm from Europe and I always used 1 billion to say 10^9. I hardly see how I would not have noticed figures being so different in say, news articles from America and Britain.
- hessenwolf 13y agoWhen I was growing up in Ireland, a billion was a million million in Britain and Ireland. Now, we have adopted the American thousand million. In Germany and Italy, a thousand million is a Milliard, and a billion is a trillion.
- rplnt 13y agoSlovak and Czech have it same as Germany/Italy.
- a-priori 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
- hessenwolf 13y agoI think I have genuinely never seen scientific notation used in an accouting context. If it can be rounded, then we will use 1MM or 1B. I see it as follows. Unlike science, where there are a few numbers related in complex ways, accounting has very many numbers, related in very simple ways.
- brazzy 13y agoThen prepare to have your mind blown (if you haven't heard about this before): the correct culture-agnostic term is "grouping separator" because not everyone uses 3 digit groups - in some East Asian languages (specifically Japan and China, not sure who else) you have separate words for "ten thousand" and use 4 digit groups.