Contexts

Posted Jul 28, 2022 17:08 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Contexts by sammythesnake
Parent article: Native Python support for units?

The short scale has won, the official definition of billion is 10^9, and trillion 10^12.

And I've never heard of your long scale, to me a billion was a million^2, a trillion was a billion^2. Easily described, you can have a million billion no problem ... (apart from it being a huge amount of whatever :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Contexts

Posted Jul 28, 2022 18:13 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

I've never heard of your long scale, and neither has Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Long_...

American English has been using short scale since before the USA was a country.

France, bizarrely, switched from short scale to long scale in the 20th century (this being officially confirmed in 1961).

British official usage was declared to be short scale in 1974, on the occasion of the Tory member for Tiverton asking Harold Wilson if he was going to affirm British official usage to be long scale.

"Winning" long vs. short scale

Posted Jul 30, 2022 15:39 UTC (Sat) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Depends on your locale. In German we use long scale, which admittedly causes no end of confusion when people "translate" English news snippets, but I don't see that changing any time soon.