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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

The european/american thousands separator always manages to confuse me for a second: "Two Euros a month? Who gives a crap?"

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I hear a lot of people saying that. Interesting, however, is that I, as European, don't even think twice about it[1]. My brain must be wired to look at the context primarily.

Why that is, I can only take a stab at: I guess we see a lot more from you guys on the other side of the pond than you see from us. :)

[1] Comma overload -- my English teacher would kill me.

I think the difference is that most Americans simply aren't exposed to various ways of writing dates, times, currencies, numbers, etc. on a regular basis.

Even within Germany, there's no consensus about where to put the Euro sign (before or after). Americans don't write times like 20:00 and say "eight" aloud. After several years in Europe, I'm fairly adept at accepting all inputs.

Your comment inspired this thought: Imagine a Firefox extension or Greasemonkey script that localizes web pages: converts dates, times, currencies, separators to the user's preference. :)

Google Chrome will translate web page languages, which is a much more difficult problem.

Oops. I normally try to use the correct separator. I don't know why I didn't this time. Strange how the brain works sometimes, I remember typing a comma, deleting it and thinking "No, I have to use the other separator on HN."

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