Isn't there also Indian way where it alternates between 2 zeros and 4 zeros?
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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It's groups of two except for that the three numbers left of the decimal point are in a group of three. So 1,00,00,000 rather than 10,000,000, for example. 1,00,00,000 is a crore, 1,00,000 is a lakh
Why do it like that?
I don't know, I'm afraid. As I understand it, the base ten positional numbering system we use in most of the world (as in, the value of each individual digit is multiplied by ten a number of times based on its position in the number) originated in northern India, but the writing of the people that developed it did not use a lot of punctuation. The modern comma comes from Europe and I'm fairly sure that the idea of a thousands separator comes from Europeans trying to write big numbers in Roman numerals. Based on that I would assume that the British colonial period introduced the idea of using a comma as a thousands separator to India. However, while Europeans were used to thinking in thousands and millions, Indians were habitually thinking in lakhs and crores, so I assume they adjusted the commas to suit that. Since the separators are literally only there to make it easier to read and do not affect any of the maths you can do with it, I don't imagine Indians would have much reason to change their system
I'll be honest: It's complete insanity to use commas within a number. If you need laughably high precision, use spaces for readability. If you need a lot of zeros, use power notation.
There is no excuse for putting commas in a number. I rest my case.
Depending on handwriting or font, commas may be more visible than spaces.
Hard disagree. I work a lot with numbers, both hand-written and typed. I've yet to come across a situation where spaces are not sufficiently clear for readability. Using spaces for separation has never been an issue with letters, why would it be an issue with numbers?
the problem with spaces is that it leaves it ambigous whether it's one or multiple separate numbers, whereas a non-space separator (i think apostrophe is just obviously the best) makes it clear: 123'000'398
it's mentioned in the explainxkcd, so apparently
Zimbabwean people would say otherwise. :)
Dr. Evils hates this one simple trick
For me it's 54,000,000,000 then my brain just glosses over the rest of the zeros. You could literally put other random symbols in the later digits number and I won't see them.