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Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with the long scale? It's pretty consistent. Each name is the last times 1000, each new prefix is 1 000 000 times the previous one, and each -iliard is 1000 times -ilion with same prefix.

    milion = 10^6, miliard = 10^9
    bilion = 10^12, biliard = 10^15
    trylion = 10^18, tryliard = 10^21
    kwadrylion = 10^24, kwadryliard = 10^27, ...

Compared to that American way is just insane (as always).

But I agree that writing 1.23 * 10^6 is preferable.

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To put what I said another way, it emphasizes the wrong things. Nobody cares how many collections of 6 digits something has. 3 digits are what people care about. (Except where they care about 4, or actually vary the number of digit groupings they care about depending on where they appear, but then, this debate has no meaning to them anyhow.)

It's consistent, but it's consistent with something that doesn't match people's usage.

Both systems are roughly equally broken, so either side mocking the other for their number system is a display of parochialism above and beyond the usual levels one would see.

> Nobody cares how many collections of 6 digits something has. 3 digits are what people care about.

I respectfully offer the Lakh [1] (1,00,000) and the Crore [2] (1,00,00,000) for other things people care about. :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakh [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crore

> Nobody cares how many collections of 6 digits something has. 3 digits are what people care about. (Except where they care about 4

4 is a more common grouping than either 3 or 6. All of China and Japan and many places in between group their digits in fours.

And I always group the digits of hexadecimal numbers in fours.

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