What's an order of magnitude among friends?

Posted Jan 31, 2013 11:05 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
In reply to: What's an order of magnitude among friends? by micka
Parent article: Quotes of the week

micka wrote:
> 72,000 rpm isn't that fast ! It's just a bit over 1 rotation per second !
Besides, you don't need to write non-significant zeroes !
Clarification for monolingual readers: in many languages "." and "," in numbers are reversed relative to their use in English.

What's an order of magnitude among friends?

Posted Jan 31, 2013 12:17 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (2 responses)

Actually, we use "," for comma separator, but we don't use "." for thousands separator. Either we use no thousand separator (for 4 digits) or we use... space (thin insecable space). At least this one is non ambiguous.

What's an order of magnitude among friends?

Posted Jan 31, 2013 12:25 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (1 responses)

micka wrote:
> Actually, we use "," for comma separator, but we don't use "." for thousands separator.
Yes, and I see I have badly oversimplified[1].

[1] http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0169/overview-9/i...

What's an order of magnitude among friends?

Posted Jan 31, 2013 12:44 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

I've even seen other variants, with the use of the dot not on the base line but higher, in the middle of the line, or the use of the apostrophe as thousand separator.

Actually, I use comma as decimal separator but have no problem reading numbers that use dot instead.
On the other hand, I'm lost as soon as some one uses the comma as thousand separator (and when it's mixed with dots, I crash).