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What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on?
(programming.dev)
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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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.