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Comment by JulienSchmidt | Hacker News Reader

The website also has info pages about the authors: 3 from Spain and 1 from Andorra. The first language of all authors seems to be either Spanish or Catalan.

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I guess that makes sense. I was just confused for a bit because I wasn't sure if the height was in in thousands of meters or miles (but if miles, it was odd in comparison to the kilometer distances). I looked up Mt. McKinley and converted the foot rating to meters to confirm that it was indeed thousands of meters, but the process got me wondering if page was mixing locale formats, or whether the my assumption that it should have been a comma to separate the thousands was wrong.

In mainland Europe we only use the metric system, even when speaking or writing English.

Also it is common to stick to the comma as decimal separator and dot as thousands separator when writing English. This convention is independent of the language used.

Same goes for date notation, dd-mm-yyyy is used (almost) always.

In Windows or Linux for example you can select the English language with Dutch localisation. It's used by almost all software developers I know.

That's a good explanation, and actually what I thought might be going on (which is why I included that example in my original question). It's interesting, because like date formats, it can sometimes be ambiguous without sufficient context. Thanks for the explanation!

In the UK, we use dd-mm-yyyy anyway, and metric for most purposes. Only the decimal comma differs from normal non-American English usage.

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