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Comment by mopsi | Hacker News Reader

What's so crazy about the German notation? Seems to make perfect sense, as it goes line-by-line from the smallest to the largest sorting unit:

1. Exact street location (street + house)

2. District (postal code)

3. City

4. Country

Also I prefer this order over the Chinese, because I assume most people handling mail will need to smallest details and it would just be very annoying if local mailmen had to skip over country and city names every time before reaching the bit they actually need.

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The house number is smaller than the street, but the street comes first. If we put the house number first, then we'd get a logical order.

You're thinking of street and house number as two things. Germans don't. Or at least I don't. Your approach makes as much sense as picking movie titles with numbers at the end apart into two things.

Street and house number are certainly two different things. It's more like series of movies (Die Hard 1, Die Hard 2, etc. are different movies but part of the same series. In the same way, a street could be seen as a series of houses or addresses. So the smallest unit is the house, then the street.

Yes, it's like a movie series. It's Die Hard 2. That's one name, not two, "2" and "Die Hard", but one: "Die Hard 2".

I didn't say it was two names, I said there are two different movies within the Die Hard series. Just like two different houses on the same street.

Yes, but each movie is a single entity and the number is part of that entity. Just like with "street+house number". It's one entity, not two.

I think he meant, that the street name is before the house number

You listed two details on one line to make the German notation seem non-crazy.

A more "logical" notation, as per the gp's comment would start:

1. Exact street location (house + street)

In Poland We do it exactly as you said:

Street_name street_number/house_number

Postal_code, City, Country

The typical English-influenced way to do it starts with the number,the most specific thing.

  10 Downing Street
  London
  SW1A 2AA

(The postcode is least-specific first: SW is South West London, 1 is the district nearest Central London, and the 2 would usually be a few streets and the AA 5-10 houses, but this is a unique code for an address that gets a lot of post.)

Funnily enough, with the addition of the newest element to that format — the postcode — to the end, this format also becomes less "logical", postcode being very specific.

Of course that's arguable, as postcode shouldn't really be considered a component of-, rather an alternative to- other sections of the address.

A postcode (or local equivalent) isn't necessarily particularly specific. For example, here in Austria the equivalent of a postcode might cover a whole city district.

Yes, similar to the US. But British post codes (or at least the ones I’ve seen in London) are in fact very specific.

Indeed, a single postcode in the UK will contain (on average) about 20 addresses and (usually) only refer to a single street.

ZIP+4 in the US is quite specific, though. E.g., my ZIP code is probably > 50k people but the ZIP+4 is just my apartment building.

You are missing the name of the house resident as the first line. Once I had my mail returned to the sender because my parents-in-law did not put our name on the envelope.

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