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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

Right but it’s specifically not, and liable to make people think “3” is an acceptable input

Again, this is bike shedding bait. I'm going by my own experience with basic mathematics in my American education where "percent" is something you multiply a number by, and usually ranges from 0 to 1.

Ex. 50% of 12 marbles is 6 (*.5, 50%).

But just looking at all the different answers in the comments here means there's no consensus on a "right" way. Hence bike shedding. A decent code base should be consistent so it can focus on more important things.

fwiw, this post was inspired by a twitter thread i created yesterday (https://twitter.com/v21/status/1301451641699340288), where i collected examples of people getting annoyed that this term doesn't exist... and most of those were inspired by frustration at this being called a percentage when it wasn't. so if you want a nice collection of people stubbing their toe on the word percentage, it's out there.

There might be bike shedding for the best answer, but this is just incorrect. Percent literally means "for one hundred"

> "percent" ... usually ranges from 0 to 1

That’s not a percentage. A percentage is between 0 and 100.

Technically even that's incorrect - percentages can be negative and greater than 100 as well.

A doubling expressed as a percentage of a given baseline would be 200%; economic growth during a recession is typically expressed by a negative percentage.

‘Per’ means ‘divided by’, ‘cent’ means 100. Units implicitly multiply, and x/100 == x*0.01.

Percent is a fancy way to 0.01, just as ‘dozen’ is a fancy way to say 12.

Percent has some strong norms around its usage (no-one buys 1200% eggs at the supermarket) but you can’t ignore the mathematical meaning.

In both cases, if someone used them as a type name, conversion to floats should involve multiplying by the unit.

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