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Comment by Kim_Bruning | Hacker News Reader

Shoot. I thought "Proportion" was the One True Correct word, but it's not.

Float values between 0 and 1 are very very useful, and I use them all over the place, and I actually thought everyone did (and everyone called them 'Proportions')

Unlike percentages, you can just multiply them with the number you want the 'proportion' of,

Quick, how do you calculate 20% of 50% of 12345!?

(it's (20/100) * (50/100) * 12345)

Ok, now with 'proportions' 0.2 of 0.5 of 12345 :

Why, that's 0.2 * 0.5 * 12345 .

Am I actually the odd one out here?

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I too am surprised "proportion" was not the obvious answer.

Here's another recent HN/Twitter discussion [0] that surprised me and made me think a lot of programmers haven't done much numerical programming.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24223033

One of the answers was edited to “portion”, which is the same idea, I think either portion or proportion is elegant and simple. If anyone has been using proportion then I’d stick with that, though portion is nice and succinct.

In general usage, 'proportion' is not limited to the unit interval [1][2]. Offhand, however, I cannot think of a use of 'portion' that does not refer to part of a whole [3]. I think this is the best suggestion so far.

[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/proportion

[2]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proportion (3rd. entry)

[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/portion

This is weird, someone in the OP thread said what you have.

A portion of fries can be 80 individuals, the proportion of all fries in the fryer might be 0.1; proportions are often expressed in percentages.

So "the proportion of the population using my tool is 1%" means 1/100, ie 0.01 of a population normalised to unity.

Pro-portion is like pro-rated, it's taken as in comparison to the whole (normalised to the whole, if you like).

"What proportion did you contribute" == what share of the whole did you contribute.

[en-gb native]

It makes most sense in formulas:

Instead of x=(foo/100) * (bar/100) * baz

you can do x=foo * bar * baz.

Which is rather more readable!

Probabilities in statistics are also expressed in this manner.

Meanwhile I found out that the Dutch dictionary actually has Perunage for this usage, especially in finance. So maybe that's he term I'll start using?

Looked it up, and a 'perunage' is defined as 'a percentage divided by a hundred'.

Which is indeed technically correct, and even an easy way to explain it the first time.

Of course this rather undersells the elegance and simplicity of perunages, but I'll take it.

Not constrained to the interval [0,1], though: The change in the stockmarket was -5 percent or -0.05 perunage today, but +300 percent or +3 perunage over the last xyz years.

So it is synonymous with 'ratio'?

Latin for one is ūnus, so percent -> perun would be logical, those sensible Dutch ...

This the right answer! permyriad -> per 1000. percent -> per 100. perunage -> per 1. I now have another way to impress/irritate my peers!

I like it, but as I do not work in a Dutch-speaking environment, if I were to do this, someone would eventually come along and 'fix' it (assuming I could get it through review in the first place.)

I thought this too, so you’re not alone. I’ve been very surprised to learn what a small minority we are.

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