Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
What do you use as a thousands separator then?
I'm mostly unfamiliar with different systems than the standard comma for thousands and period for decimal. I've seen period used for thousands before, but in that case how does one differentiate between a thousands period and a decimal period?
1'000.00
1 000.00
1'000,00
1 000,00
work without confusing anyone.
While 1.000 or 1,000 can be read as 1 or 1000.
spaces work fine for natural language, but what about regular languages. How should a programming language parse something like
x = 1 234Sure that works fine in whitespace agnostic languages, but in something like shell script, it could mean "1,234" or ["1", "234"] (currently, it would be the latter). In a functional language (e.g. Haskell) it would also be parsed as 2 separate numbers.
Spaces?!?! What are we, animals?
Simple, don't use a thousand separator. One thousand and a half would be 1000.5
This is fine for numbers that only have one separator. But they get difficult to read when they get longer. No reasonable person can read 957245815627 and functionally parse it in their minds. Can you tell at a glance, without counting digits that the number is nine trillion? Ninety billion? Nine hundred billion? You could be off by entire orders of magnitude and not even realize it until you stop and count the individual digits.
Breaking it up into 957,245,815,627 helps the user visually see the hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions the same way we use them in language. The comma is a stand-in for the place descriptor. 957(billion)245(million)815(thousand)627. So now your brain can easily parse that there are 245 millions in this number, instead of accidentally seeing 724 or 458.
A comma here could also be parsed as a vector, an apostrophe has never been used in numbers as anything other than a thousand separator. Well, except as the transpose command in Matlab... or to indicate a character vector... fuck. Just use scientific notation or spell it out for large numbers.