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aviraldg

"...AlternativeTo had about 217.000 visitors on that first day..."

Why can't we all agree upon a universal, consistent notation for math and science?

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Agreed. Three decimal places is awfully high precision for a measurement of people.

I have little trouble reading period for thousands separation. Complaining about MM/DD/YYYY date formatting is something that I whinge about way more often.

PS: I'm an Aussie living in the US.

The metric system still fails to impose itself universally, so we can wait some time before the decimal mark is unified...

The 2006 CIA Factbook stated that the "US is the only industrialized nation that does not mainly use the metric system", (in addition to non-industrialised Burma/Myanmar and Liberia).

This particular case is not English vs. Metric, but rather lack of cohesion in the metric system.

English: Use commas for separating thousands, use periods for decimals.

Metric: Use spaces for separating thousands, use periods OR commas for decimals.

In this instance, the English approach is obviously the superior one, as spaces are more confusing to use as a delimiter than commas, and there should only be one way to write decimals for consistency.

There is some other system that uses periods for thousands and commas for decimals - the exact reverse of what you've listed as the english convention. I always thought it was a european convention. It makes more sense than what you've listed as the metric convention.

Esperanto and Interlingua both use that convention.

Indeed, and that is what I've seen from many Europeans.

However, I think that must be a convention from before the universal adoption of the metric system by the EU, as the 22nd General Conference on Weights and Measures (held in 2003) declared that the symbol for decimals should be "the point on the line or the comma on the line".

i.e. the official metric system symbol is period or comma, regardless of what actual Europeans use.

http://www.bipm.org/utils/en/pdf/Resol22CGPM-EN.pdf [page 11]

>i.e. the official metric system symbol is period or comma, regardless of what actual Europeans use.

Regardless? Those (and mainly comma) is exactly what Europeans use. It's not like there is some other symbol besides those too in use for that purpose.

Yes, there is another convention. (spaces)+(commas or periods) != (periods)+(commas)

What you are talking about is a European convention, not a metric convention. There is a difference.

>This particular case is not English vs. Metric, but rather lack of cohesion in the metric system.

Yes, and the grand-parent already said that this particular case is insignificant compared to English vs Metric.

Let's first fix this, and then we worry about decimal separator.

I´m european and the natural way for me is period for thousands and commas for decimals, although I´m aware of the imperial way, with commas for thousands and periods for decimals.

Another important difference is that in Europe we understand a billion as a million of millions (10^12), not a thousand of millions (10^9). For us, a 10^9 is a miliard. Luckily I´m also aware of the use of billions for 10^12 and whenever I read it on a US or UK text I understand correctly. Otherwise, saying that there are 7 billion people on Earth would be an extreme exageration...

US, UK and Russia use billion in this strange way

I agree! It's a mess. We're based in Sweden so we do it this way.

On a slightly different tangent, why do people put the dollar sign in front of the numer?

I believe that was inherited from how the British pound sign is written: £100 rather than 100£ has long been the standard. But I don't know why, where, or when the British usage originated.

Maybe because: $1 25¢

So that's like writing: Kg 19 300 g

I understand it's tradition, but the fact that people keep using it kills me. Especially when people start using kilo $, and in "$ 100K".

Tip: It's written with a lower-case k. Capital K in front of B means 1024 to some people (including me), but 1000 is always written as k.

Thanks. You are correct about lower case k for kilo (but upper case for mega and up), but the official unit for 1024 bytes is the kibibyte, which is KiB:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte

That's why I said "Capital K in front of B means 1024 to some people".

this is why I usually use spaces to separate thousands, so that I don't confuse people expecting either notation.

The standard where I'm from is also a period for thousands, and a comma for the decimal fraction, but reading as much English scientific and computing literature, I am well aware that the period for decimal fraction is almost a de facto standard. So I tend to use spaces for the thousands and a period for the decimal fraction, so that anyone who sees the spaces can infer what the other symbol means.

Fortunately I am not aware of any notation system that uses a space to separate the decimal fraction :)

This takes me back to 20 years ago when I was studying Japanese. Their traditional (pre-Arabic-numerals) system uses four-digit groupings instead of three: There are characters for ten, hundred, thousand, and ten-thousand. (I assume Chinese is similar.)

Sometimes we use the number "1 million" to mean "a lot"; in that system it would be written as 100 ten-thousands. A more "natural" way to express "a lot" in that system is ten-thousand ten-thousands, or 100 million in our system.

I loved learning little "weird" things like that, and discovering that our own way of doing things isn't the only way. Studying other cultures also teaches us about our own.

Any better-qualified Japanese speakers please correct anything I've gotten wrong, this memory file was just swapped in from 20 years ago...

India uses a system sort of like that as well, even in English. The first major multiple is thousands, like in the western system, but then it goes in multiples of 100 above that: a lakh is 100 thousands (written 1,00,000), and a crore is 100 lakh (10 million, written 1,00,00,000).

Or use the engineering notation: 217k users.

> 2.17e5

FTFY

s/217.000/217'000/ FIFY

217.000,00 FIFY

Actually, no. The way he wrote it is (one of) the official way(s) to do it in Sweden.

That's the joke. There are about a dozen different language and cultural dependent "standards" for writing decimal separators and number groupings.

I especially like the ambiguity you get in those cases where some places use the period as decimal separator and the period as number grouping character and then other places do it the other way around.

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