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Comment by static_noise | Hacker News Reader

You might want to use a dot for those non-Germans over here.

I think dash would be more intuitive to represent a range here.

Your comment about Germans intrigued me so I googled it. If you were referring to a comma as a digit separator, there's about 70 countries that use the comma as a decimal point: most of Europe, Africa, and South America, many more than just Germans :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark#Countries_using...

I'm pretty sure more countries in the world use a decimal comma than a decimal point. Certainly more than use Fahrenheit, anyway.

In South Africa, the decimal comma is the standard, but beyond school, I almost never see it used. The space is still retained as a thousands seperator (I don't think I've ever seen a comma thousands seperator in a South African context).

The widespread use of the decimal point in SA is presumably the legacy of cheap digital calculators that couldn't be localised effectively.

I wonder how other decimal comma countries have been able to stave off the decimal point.

> I wonder how other decimal comma countries have been able to stave off the decimal point.

Yes, I looked it up a while ago for some reason, and was surprised the comma was so widely used.

I'm also surprised SA uses the comma, because if there's any kind of pattern it seems to be former British Empire countries, or places where Britain had some historical connection, that use decimal point, and Continental Europe, or former European colonies, using the decimal comma.

It's a temperature range. You see there four integers.

Indeed, I think brackets would be more explicit than parenthesis.

I thought most of Europe used commas. They do in Holland.

Is a digital numeric approximation of a real number called "floating comma" in those countries? Or "floating full stop" in the UK?

"Floating point numbers" are called "Fließkommazahlen" in German, which is a word-for-word translation of "Floating comma numbers".

So at least for German I would say yes.

Yes, German is so precise! (More precise than floating point.) I'd be surprised if there weren't long German words for different kinds of floating point numbers, that spell out the unabbreviated name of the IEEE standard and the exact number of bits used for mantissa and exponent.

"siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig". In German, whole numbers can be expressed as single words...[0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_words#German

Seven hundred seventy-seven thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven.

Whether it is written with spaces or dashes or neither is nothing more than an artefact of orthography. Extreme compound words can be created in English, too, they just look less like compounds (and they violate cultural aesthetics more than in German).

Actually the only difference with German is that a) some simple words are longer and b) compound words are always chained together in writing.

"Floating point number" is a compound word in English too but there are very few compound words which are chained together as in German (e.g. hardware, blackbird).

No, it's called a "floating period", like in the US.

I'm in the US and I've never heard that term before. Google seems equally confused.

The parent of my comment was making a joke (I doubt he seriously thinks people say "floating full stops" in the UK) so I made a joke too, in the same vein. You know, period/full stop...

It may not have been the best joke ever but I don't think it deserved 3 downvotes. People can be really tiresome sometimes.

(I'm not saying to you BTW; I don't think you downvoted.)

Edit: Okay, I received two upvotes after writing this, so now my post feels way too bitter. I'll leave it because I do think the point still stands - people are sometimes way too ready to downvote posts here (I don't mean mine, but anyone's) - but I'll also say people here are really very nice most of the time too.

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