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Comment by phist_mcgee | Hacker News Reader

I find the mix of your commas and periods in numbers a little confusing.

>305,8 m/s but also 8.7m and ~1.4 hPa.

I know that Europeans have a different notation to Americans, but is there a rule here I am missing?

No, there is no missed rule, the comma is the only official decimal separator in these parts. But I can relate to the the OP. Us here in the comma world are forever converting numbers in CSV and Excel files back and forth so as to display them in a proper number format. It’s like that darned USB port, you have to flip it 3 times to get it right.

No missed rule. Thank you for your feedback. I have replaced the decimal separators '.' with ','. Sorry for the confusion.

This should be the grand compromise.

The US will convert to metric, however everyone else has to convert from commas to decimal points.

Places using decimal separators and the metric system are the real winners here.

I'll celebrate for a whole week whenever the US converts to the metric system. I hope I'll still be young enough to handle it.

Since it's a big "moat" for parts manufacturing (mainly for defense industry)... I predict the USA will give up imperial units when it's empire finally collapses.

Perhaps in the next few decades as China builds its own economic sphere.

Um, it's unamerican to use "imperial" units. When you have a revolution, you have to get rid of all things imperial!

Therefore US pints are 16oz, not 20oz, and so on for most fluid measures (fluid ounces are based on dry ounces, which are avoirdupois, not imperial).

We kept linear measurements the same (feet, yard, miles). So it's a bit of a stretch to say we're not imperial. I'd say it's "US imperial".

I was about to comment that feet, yards and miles are not imperial measure; but I checked, and WP says they are in fact imperial units. So i learned something today.

Carter started a transition to metric in the 1970s and Reagan killed it. It became a nationalist thing to keep it.

Growing up in Switzerland with a dot as the decimal separator, I newer knew just how much of an outlier we are in this part of the world until now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#/media/File:...

We also use apostrophe as the thousands separator, so: 1'234'567.89 which I personally always found much more readable that using commas and dots. Is there any other country that uses this combination?

While OP here made a mistake, some countries use mixed systems depending on what it is used for . Switzerland for example uses comma for normal numbers and dot for currency alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Examples_of_...

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